Carti in categoria Literature & Biography

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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...