John Crowther

A collection of Shakespeare's one hundred and fifty-four sonnets with an index of first lines.

The Tempest is a comedy that was written by William Shakespeare. The action centers around a sorcerer named Prospero, who is the rightful Duke of Milan, as he plans to restore his daughter's place in society through manipulation. Though The Tempest was listed as a comedy in Shakespeare's First Folio it is now often considered to be a tragicomedy. Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare is a delightful comic love story. The play begins with a shipwreck,...

Presents the complete text to William Shakespeare's play "King Lear" with an easy-to-understand translation on facing pages, helping students better understand the work and its meaning.

Shakespeare's classic comedy depicting the romantic struggles of Rosalind and Orlando is accompanied by scene-by-scene analysis, text, plot, characters, and staging of the play

This edition of Othello has a new, illustrated introduction by leading American scholar Ayanna Thompson, which addresses such key issues as race, religion and gender, as well as looking at ways in which the play has been adapted in more recent times. Othello is one of Shakespeare's great tragedies-written in the same five-year period as Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth. The new introduction attends to the play's different meanings throughout history,...

"For this updated critical edition of Romeo and Juliet, Hester Lees-Jeffries has written a completely new Introduction. It draws on recent research in theatre to set Romeo and Juliet in its mid-1590s context,making connections with other plays by Shakespeare and other literature of the period, as well as with the social and cultural contexts of the day, with discussions of London and Italy; dancing and duelling; marriage, gender and sexuality. It...

"This book presents a historical overview of The Tempest in performance, recommends film versions, takes a detailed look at specific productions and includes interviews with three leading directors - Peter Brook, Sam Mendes and Rupert Goold - so that we may get a sense of the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible, a variety that gives Shakespeare his unique capacity to be reinvented and made 'our contemporary' four centuries after...

This play is set in the quiet town of Messina in Sicily, where two pairs of lovers, Benedick and Beatrice, and Claudio and Hero, meet at the house of Leonato, Hero's father and Beatrice's uncle. Benedick and Beatrice engage in a war of witty exchanges, while Claudio and Hero pledge their love for each other and decide to get married. However, in an unexpected turn of events, Hero and Claudio are estranged and Benedick and Beatrice confess their love....

A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of the most popular comedies of the legendary playwright, William Shakespeare. The play revolves around Hermia and her best friend, Helena. Hermia runs away into the woods with her lover, Lysander, and Demetrius, the man of her father's choice, follows them. Helena follows Demetrius, as she is in love with him and wishes she could win his love. In the woods, they come across Oberon and Titania, King and Queen of the...