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Much Ado About Nothing is one of William Shakespeare’s best-loved comedies. Much Ado About Nothing includes two quite different stories of romantic love. Hero and Claudio fall in love at first sight, but an outsider, Don John, strikes out at their happiness. Beatrice and Benedick are kept apart by pride and mutual antagonism until others decide to play Cupid. The word “nothing” would have been pronounced “noting” in Shakespeare’s time, so the play is as much ...

The Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare Series presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare's works. The textual editing takes account of recent scholarship while giving the material a careful reappraisal.The Merchant of Venice is one of Shakespeare's most popular comedies, but it remains deeply controversial.The text may seem anti-Semitic; yet repeatedly, in performance, it has revealed a contrasting nature.Shylock, though vanquished in the law-court, often triumphs in the theatre. In h...

William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night is a comedy. In medieval and Tudor times, the 'Twelfth Night' was the end of a winter festival that started on 31 October (All Hallows Eve, or as we know it today, Halloween). Mulled cider was drunk, and special pastries baked, and a king and queen (who could have been servants in charge for the night) ruled the festival until the clock struck midnight. People expected a topsy-turvy evening, with singing and clowning about, when the normal order of things was ...

Retold by: Rachel Bladon Macmillan Readers provide high-quality and enjoyable texts which your students will want to read from beginning to end. Carefully-graded levels from Beginner to Upper-intermediate so your students get the right reading material for their ability. Eight pages of additional exercises and Audio CD in selected titles. A range of new and exciting titles, including James Bond 007, and Meg Cabot's The Princess Diaries. A truly international range of simplified readers with...

Extensive reading improves fluency and there is a real need in theELT classroom for hand-picked classics of English literature thatare simplified and adapted for students in an accessible and engagingway. Romeo and Juliet is one of Shakespeares most popularplays adapted into contemporary English for students of Englishas a Foreign Language and interspersed with stills from the 2013movie.

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.`If music be the food of love, play on;Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,The appetite may sicken, and so die.\\''A comedic romance of mistaken identity, Twelfth Night begins with a shipwreck, splitting up Viola and her twin brother, Sebastian. Alone in a strange land, Viola disguises herself as a male servant, Cesario, in order to work for the Duke Orsino. Orsino is in love with Lady Olivia, but it is Cesario ...

Antony and Cleopatra is one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies: a spectacular, widely-ranging drama of love and war, passion and politics. Antony is divided between the responsibilities of imperial power and the intensities of his sexual relationship with Cleopatra. She, variously generous and ruthless, loving and jealous, petulant and majestic, emerges as Shakespeare's most complex depiction of a woman:`Age cannot wither her, nor custom staleHer infinite variety.'Unsurpassed in sumptous eloque...

As You Like It is one of Shakespeare's finest romantic comedies, variously lyrical, melancholy, satiric, comic and absurd. Its boldly implausible plot generates a profusion of love-lorn men, a resourceful heroine in disguise, sexual ambiguity, sceptical philosophising, and finally a multiplicity of marriages. The ironic medley of pastoral artifice, romantic ardour and quizzical reflection has helped to make As You Like It perennially popular in the theatre. A recent production was deemed `fresh,...

In Henry IV, Part 1, the King is in a doubly ironic position. His rebellion against Richard II was successful, but now he himself is beset by rebels, led by the charismatic Harry Hotspur. The King's son, Prince Hal, seems to be more concerned with the pleasures of the tavern world and the company of the fat rogue, Falstaff, than with concerns of state. Eventually, however, Hal proves a courageous foe of the rebels.This history play is lively in its interplay of political intrigue and boisterous ...

The Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare Series, with Henry V as its inaugral volume, presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare's works. The textual editing endeavours to take account of recent scholarship while giving the material a careful reappraisal.Henry V is the most famous and influential of Shakespeare's history plays. Its powerful patriotic rhetoric has resounded down the ages, gaining eloquent expression in Laurence Olivier's renowned film. Henry himself, astute and charismat...

Julius Caesar is among the best of Shakespeare's historical and political plays. Dealing with events surrounding the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., the drama vividly illustrates the ways in which power and corruption are linked.The cry `Peace, freedom and liberty!' is used to exculpate brutal realities, while personal ambitions taint public actions. Rich in characterisation and replete with eloquent rhetoric, Julius Caesar remains engrossing and topical: a play for today. An apariti...

Shakespeare's Macbeth is one of the greatest tragic dramas the world has known. Macbeth himself, a brave warrior, is fatally impelled by supernatural forces, by his proud wife, and by his own burgeoning ambition. As he embarks on his murderous course to gain and retain the crown of Scotland, we see the appalling emotional and psychological effects on both Lady Macbeth and himself. The cruel ironies of their destiny are conveyed in poetry of unsurpassed power. In the theatre, this tragedy remains...

In the hope of saving her brother's life, should a woman submit to rape? Should the law be respected when its administrator is corrupt? How powerful in the state should religion become? Although Measure for Measure ends like a comedy, with reconciliations, forgiveness and marriages, it has often been regarded as one of Shakespeare's problem plays. The drama shows the difficulty of effecting an appropriate balance between judicial severity and mercy, between sexual repression and decadence, and b...

The Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare Series, with Romeo and Juliet, Henry V and The Merchant of Venice as its inaugural volumes, presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare's works. The textual editing takes account of recent scholarship while giving the material a careful reappraisal.Its lyricism, comedy (both broad and subtle) and magical transformations have long made A Midsummer Night's Dream one of the most popular of Shakespeare's works. The supernatural and the mundane, the il...

In this new edition of Shakespeare's most controversial comedy The Merchant of Venice, the merchant Antonio - on behalf of his friend Bassano - seeks a loan from Shylock. The loan is required to impress an heiress. Shylock is a Jewish moneylender whom Antonio has always treated with the utmost contempt, and Antonio is to honour the debt with a pound of the merchant's own flesh. When Antonio defaults on the loan, Shylock prepares to take his gruesome revenge - only to find that the law is a knife...

Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's finest plays, and presents a man's conscience and the effect of guilt on his mind. A dark and bloody play, Macbeth explores reality and illusion; witchcraft and the supernatural; ambition and kingship; the natural order; light and life, darkness and death; blood and dead babies. Written just after the Gunpowder Plot, and at a time when people were often tried for treason, Macbeth makes much of the beliefs of an extremely superstitious age. King James 1 believed in...

The drama of Romeo and Juliet is one of the most famous of all tragedies. It tells the story of two 'star-crossed' lovers whose young lives are cruelly cut short because of a bitter feud between their families. Since it was published in 1597, Romeo and Juliet has been performed all round the world, made into box office recordbreaking films, ballets and adapted by Leonard Bernstein for his world-famous musical, West Side Story. Shakespeare was young when he wrote the play, and the exquisite langu...

The Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare Series presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare's works. The textual editing takes account of recent scholarship while giving the material a careful reappraisal.Much Ado About Nothing has long been celebrated as one of Shakespeare's most popular comedies. The central relationship, between Benedick and Beatrice, is wittily combative until love prevails. Broader comedy is provided by Dogberry, Verges and the watchmen. The drama ranges between the...

The Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare Series, with Henry V and The Merchant of Venice as its inaugral volumes, presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare's works. The textual editing takes account of recent scholarship while giving the material a careful reappraisal.Othello has long been recognised as one of the most powerful of Shakespeare's tragedies. This is an intense drama of love, deception, jealousy and destruction. Desdemona's love for Othello, the Moor, transcends racial pre...

Richard II is one of Shakespeare's finest works: lucid, eloquent, and boldly structured. It can be seen as a tragedy, or a historical play, or a political drama, or as one part of a vast dramatic cycle which helped to generate England's national identity. Today, to some of us, Richard II may appear conservative; but, in Shakespeare's day, it could appear subversive: `I am Richard II', declared an indignant Queen Elizabeth.Numerous recent revivals in the theatre and on screen have demonstrated th...