The Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative texts from leading scholars in editions designed to interpret and illuminate the plays for modern readers. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful not...

Early Modern Drama in Performance is a collection of essays in honor of Lois Potter, the distinguished author of five monographs, including most recently The Life of William Shakespeare (2012), and numerous articles, edited collections, and editions. This collection’s emphasis on Shakespearean and early modern drama reflects the area for which Potter is most widely known, as a performance critic, editor, and literary scholar. The essays by a diverse group of scholars who have been influenc...

L'Allegro (which means "the happy man" in Italian) is invariably paired with the contrasting pastoral poem, Il Penseroso ("the pensive man"), which depicts a similar day spent in contemplation and thought. Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

'Fascinating scholarship. Todd conveys Behn's vivacious character and the mores of the time' New York Times'All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn; for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds,' said Virginia Woolf. Yet that tomb, in Westminster Abbey, records one of the few uncontested facts about this Restoration playwright, poet of the erotic and bisexual, political propagandist, novelist and spy: the date of her death,...

The Oxford Shakespeare General Editor: Stanley Wells The Oxford Shakespeare offer authoritative texts from leading scholars in editions designed to interpret and illuminate the plays for modern readers - a new, modern-spelling text, collated and edited from the early texts - wide-ranging introduction discusses the play's historical contexts, political significance, characters, sources, and language - detailed stage history designed to meet the needs of students and theatre...

The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth was written by the English playwright William Shakespeare, based on the life of Henry VIII of England. An alternative title, All is True, is recorded in contemporary documents, the title Henry VIII not appearing until the play's publication in the First Folio of 1623. Stylistic evidence indicates that the play was written by Shakespeare in collaboration with, or revised by, his successor, John Fletcher. It is also somewhat characteris...

In her famous speech to rouse the English troops staking out Tilbury at the mouth of the Thames during the Spanish Armada's campaign, Queen Elizabeth I is said to have proclaimed, "I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king." Whether or not the transcription is accurate, the persistent attribution of this provocative statement to England's most studied and celebrated queen illustrates some of the contradictions and cultural anxieties that dom...

In the most complete, accurate, and up-to-date narrative of Shakespeare's life ever written, Park Honan uses a wealth of fresh information to dramatically alter our perceptions of the actor, poet, and playwright. The young poet's relationships, his early courtship of Anne Hathaway, their marriage, his attitudes to women such as Jennet Davenant, Marie Mountjoy, and his own daughters, are seen in a new light, illuminating Shakespeare's needs, habits, passions and concerns. Park Honan examines t...

A TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BEST BOOK OF THE YEARDrawing on an exceptional combination of skills as literary biographer, novelist, and chronicler of London history, Peter Ackroyd surely re-creates the world that shaped Shakespeare--and brings the playwright himself into unusually vivid focus. With characteristic narrative panache, Ackroyd immerses us in sixteenth-century Stratford and the rural landscape–the industry, the animals, even the flowers–that wou...

'a Casement violently opened just over my Head, and a Woman gave three frightful Skreetches, and then cry'd, Oh! Death, Death, Death!' Purporting to be an eye-witness account, the Journal of the Plague Year is a record of the devastation wrought by the Great Plague of 1665 on the city of London. Defoe's fictional narrator, known only as 'H. F.', recounts in vivid detail the progress of the disease and the desperate attempts to contain it. He catalogues the rising death to...

Jane Shore often gets just a byline in history. We know her name, and that she was the mistress of a king. But who was this woman caputred for the stage by Shakespeare in Richard III, fictionalised by Jean Plaidy and others? Where did she come from? And how was it that having been mistress to the most powerful man in the land, she ended her years in prison and poverty?Jane Shore was born into a family of merchants and was married early, to William Shore. H...

This long-awaited and masterfully edited volume contains nearly all of the writings of Queen Elizabeth I: the clumsy letters of childhood, the early speeches of a fledgling queen, and the prayers and poetry of the monarch's later years. The first collection of its kind, Elizabeth I reveals brilliance on two counts: that of the Queen, a dazzling writer and a leading intellect of the English Renaissance, and that of the editors, whose copious annotations make the book not only essen...