These Books Among Us

The Tempest by William Shakespeare ( pages) My Rating: 4 Stars Date Read: 4 November 2016 Synopsis: “Sources and Contexts” offers a rich collection of documents on the play’s central themes—magic and witchcraft, politics and religion, geography and travel. Writers include Ovid, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Gabriel Naudé, Michel de Montaigne, and William Strachey. “Criticism” collects eighteen responses to The Tempest, from John Dryden and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Stephen Orgel and Leah Marcus. “Rewritings and Appropriations” includes creative reactions to The Tempest, by playwrights, filmmakers, and poets, among them H.D., Peter Greenaway, and Ted Hughes. A Selected Bibliography is also included. My Review: I had to read this play  for my Shakespeare class in college and it was the first time I had ever read it. This was an interesting play, and I'm not sure where it will fit on my scale for my favorite Shakespearean plays. While the plot was pretty straight...

Twelfth Night, Or What You Will by William Shakespeare (430 pages) My Rating: 3.5 Stars Date Read: 25 October 2016 Synopsis: This edition of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night reprints the Bevington edition of the play along with 7 sets of thematically arranged primary documents and illustrations designed to facilitate many different approaches to Shakespeare's play and the early modern culture out of which the play emerges. The texts include facsimiles of period documents, maps, woodcuts, descriptions of the popular customs associated with Twelfth Night, anti-theatrical tracts, royal proclamations concerning dress, laws prohibiting certain sexual acts, poems fantasizing those very acts, early modern texts on household economies, passages from Puritan conduct books, excerpts from Ovid and Montaigne, a representative range of early modern opinions about boy actors, and theories of laughter. Besides contextualizing the audience for Shakespeare's play and shedding light on ...

Hamlet by William Shakespeare (398 pages) My Rating: 4.5 Stars Date Read: 25 September 2016 Synopsis: This Norton Critical Edition of Hamlet features a newly edited text based on the Second Quarto (1604–05). It is accompanied by detailed explanatory annotations and appendices providing important passages from both the First Quarto Hamlet (1603) and the Folio Hamlet (1623). Robert S. Miola’s thought-provoking introduction, “Imagining Hamlet,” considers this tragedy as it has taken shape in the theater, in criticism, and in various cultures. “The Actors’ Gallery” presents famous actors and actresses—among them Sarah Bernhardt, Ellen Terry, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Kenneth Branagh, and Jude Law—reflecting on their roles in major productions of Hamlet for stage and screen. “Contexts” includes generous selections from the Bible, Greek (Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides) and Roman (Seneca) tragedies, Saxo Grammaticus, Dante, Thomas More, and Thomas Kyd. ...

The Country Wife by William Wycherley (204 pages) My Rating: 4 Stars Date Read: 10 April 2016 Synopsis: 'Cuckolds like lovers should themselves deceive' So concludes one of Wycherley's most revived and much discussed plays. It is a satirical comedy sharply focussed on the follies, vices and hypocrisies of Restoration London through its central characters: the desperate Pinchwife; his naive wife; the sex-obsessed Horner and Lady Fidget's 'virtuous gang' of town ladies. Wycherley's strong wit informs almost every speech and his alarmingly familiar revelations of character leave us to draw our own conclusions. It remains a controversial play, admired as satire or farce, condemned as immoral and frivolous, and appreciated again as a serious work of dramatic art. Modern critics have much debated its central themes, and question marks remain: is Horner hero or villain? This student edition contains a fully annotated version of the playtext in moder...