Classic and pre-20th century plays Books

Bring on the merriment whenever you open this collection of Shakespeare’s entertaining comedies.The comedies of William Shakespeare—including The Tempest, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and As You Like It—have...

Published to mark the 400th anniversary of the book's original publication, this facsimile edition faithfully reproduces one of the finest copies held in the British Library collections.The significance of the First Folio cannot be underestimated. It is...

This is the full Shakespeare play adapted into simplified plain English (aimed at a 10 year-old reading age), and brought to life as a vivid and engaging full-color graphic novel.With its mix of real people who stumble into a fairy kingdom (with its own...

A bitter feud between the Montagues and the Capulets keeps the city of Verona, Italy, in a state of constant unrest. Despite the enmity, Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet fall passionately in love. Enlisting the help of Friar Laurence, the young lovers...

Witches, murder, ghosts, and madness - one of Shakespeare's finest tragedies is also a perfect fit for the graphic novel format. This compelling adaptation depicts every blood-curdling scene in easy-to-follow illustrations, accompanied by Shakespeare's...

Witches, murder, ghosts, and madness - one of Shakespeare's finest tragedies is also a perfect fit for the graphic novel format. This compelling adaptation depicts every blood-curdling scene in easy-to-follow illustrations, accompanied by Shakespeare's...

This is an English translation of Euripides' tragedy Hecuba about Hecuba's grief over her daughter and son's deaths and the revenge she enacts over her son's death. Focus Classical Library provides close translations with notes and essays to provide...

William Shakespeare is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political...

Richard III: The 30-Minute Shakespeare This edition of Richard III features seven scenes, opening with the Duke of Gloucester's villainous "Winter of our discontent" speech and followed by his audacious wooing of Lady Anne. Queen Margaret's...

Age range 12+This edition of Henry V presents eight scenes, using all actors as Chorus. Included in this riveting cutting are Henry's inspiring "band of brothers" oration to his men, a merry interlude with Bardolph and friends, and an...

Age range 12+Drawing on his eighteen years of experience as a teaching artist for Folger Shakespeare Library, Nick Newlin offers eighteen scenes to get young actors on their feet performing Shakespeare with confidence, understanding, and fun!Each scene...

Age range 12+Julius Caesar: The 30-Minute Shakespeare presents eight spellbinding scenes from this timeless masterpiece. The action begins as the soothsayer warns Caesar of the Ides of March and continues as Brutus conspires against Caesar...

Age range 12+The Two Gentlemen of Verona: The 30-Minute Shakespeare presents six captivating scenes from this high-spirited play. Proteus pledges his love to Julia, but then falls in love with Silvia, who had planned to elope with Proteus's...

Age range 12+Hamlet: The 30-Minute Shakespeare offers five scenes from this enduring tragedy. The Ghost of Hamlet's father calls for vengeance, and Hamlet uses the players to prove Claudius guilty. The cutting includes the murder of Polonius,...

Age range 12+King Henry IV, Part I: The 30-Minute Shakespeare combines comedy, tragedy, and history into a rollicking six-scene drama performable in a half hour.This adaptation includes tavern revelry, highway robbery, and the telling...

Age range 12+Othello: The 30-Minute Shakespeare is a gripping seven-scene interpretation of this Shakespearean masterpiece.There is a dramatic build as each successive event draws Othello closer to jealous rage. Iago convinces Othello that...

Age range 12+King Lear: The 30-Minute Shakespeare renders six powerful scenes from this enduring tragedy. Starting with Lear's banishment of Cordelia, the plot advances irresistibly, featuring scenes of brother Edmund's villainous plotting and...

Age range 12+The Comedy of Errors: The 30-Minute Shakespeare offers five raucous scenes from this extravaganza of mistaken identity.The abridgement begins with a dramatic physical enactment of the twins' separation at sea. The play continues...

Age range 12+Love's Labor's Lost: The 30-Minute Shakespeare plays three action-packed scenes from this tale of King Navarre and his three lords, who have vowed to retire from women for three years. Naturally, the Princess of France and her three...

Age range 12+Planning a school or amateur Shakespeare production? The best way to experience the plays is to perform them, but getting started can be a challenge: The complete plays are too long and complex, while scene selections or simplified language...

Age range 12+Planning a school or amateur Shakespeare production? The best way to experience the plays is to perform them, but getting started can be a challenge: The complete plays are too long and complex, while scene selections or simplified language...

When Falstaff calls upon the sky to rain potatoes in The Merry Wives of Windsor, he is highlighting the late sixteenth-century belief that the exotic vegetable, recently introduced to England from the Americas, was an aphrodisiac. In Romeo and Juliet,...

The locations of Shakespeare's plays range from Greece, Turkey and Syria to England, and they range in time from 1000 BC to the early Tudor age. He never set a play explicitly in Elizabethan London, which he and his audience inhabited, but always in...

The First Folio the celebrated collected edition of William Shakespeare's plays was published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death. It was compiled by John Heminge and Henry Condell, both actors in Shakespeare's company, the King's Men, and...

Age range 12+Planning a school or amateur Shakespeare production? The best way to experience the plays is to perform them, but getting started can be a challenge: The complete plays are too long and complex, while scene selections or simplified language...

Age range 12+Planning a school or amateur Shakespeare production? The best way to experience the plays is to perform them, but getting started can be a challenge: The complete plays are too long and complex, while scene selections or simplified language...

A wickedly dark comedy set in the aftermath of William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.Set during the fall of the Roman Empire just after the blood-soaked conclusion of Shakespeare's play, the years of bloody battles are over, the country has been stolen...

No Fear Shakespeare gives you the complete text of Hamlet on the left-hand page, side-by-side with an easy-to-understand translation on the right. Each No Fear Shakespeare contains:The complete text...

'This edition of Antony and Cleopatra gives contemporary readers access to Shakespeare's meaning as no other edition does . While other editors may provide basic information about the historical setting of the play, Jan Blits makes palpable the shape and...

George Lyman Kittredge's insightful editions of Shakespeare have endured in part because of this eclecticism, his diversity of interests, and his wide-ranging accomplishments-all of which are reflected in the valuable notes in each...

This is an English translation of Euripides' tragedy The Trojan Women about the consequences of war; the victors and the fate of those defeated in war. Focus Classical Library provides close translations with notes and essays to provide access to...

This anthology includes four outstanding translations of Euripides' plays: Medea, Bacchae, Hippolytus, and Heracles. These translations remain close to the original, with extensive introductions, interpretive essays, and footnotes. This series is...

This anthology includes English translations of three plays of Sophocles' Oidipous Cycle: Antigone, King Oidipous, and Oidipous at Colonus. The trilogy includes an introductory essay on Sophocles life, ancient theatre, and the mythic and religious...

Shakespeare by McBean collects 300 images, many never before published, taken by the renowned photographer Angus McBean. Incorporating images from every one of Shakespeare's plays performed at the RSC, with some from the Old Vic, between the years...

The Power of Darkness (1886) is a play by Leo Tolstoy. Forbidden for decades in Tolstoy's native Russia, the five-act play was first staged in Paris, where it earned praise from some of France's leading critics. Noted for its brutal depiction of violence...

LARGE PRINT EDITION. Macbeth, a successful solider, is visited by Three Witches who claim he will soon become king, but his ascension may be thwarted by other parties. Macbeth is driven by ambition and takes drastic steps to secure his place on the...

Read Romeo and Juliet in graphic-novel form - with NO FEAR!  NOW IN COLOUR! Based on the No Fear Shakespeare translations, this dynamic graphic novel - now with color added - is impossible to put down. The illustrations are...

Read Macbeth in graphic-novel form - with NO FEAR!  NOW IN COLOUR! Based on the No Fear Shakespeare translations, this dynamic graphic novel - now with color added - is impossible to put down. The illustrations are...

Read Hamlet in graphic-novel form - with NO FEAR!  NOW IN COLOUR! Based on the No Fear Shakespeare translations, this dynamic graphic novel - now with colour added - is impossible to put down. The illustrations are...

No Fear Shakespeare gives you the complete text of The Comedy of Errors on the left-hand page, side-by-side with an easy-to-understand translation on the right.Each No Fear Shakespeare contains:The complete...

We are often told that Shakespeare is our contemporary, yet we insist just as often on the Elizabethan quality of his work as it reflects a culture remote from our own. Beginning with this paradox, Howard Felperin explores the question of modernity in...

A bold new reconception of ancient Greek drama as a mode of philosophical thinking.The Philosophical Stage offers an innovative approach to ancient Greek literature and thought that places drama at the heart of intellectual history. Drawing on evidence...

This volume offers the fruits of Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff's dynamic collaboration on the plays of Sophocles' Theban cycle, presenting the translators' Oedipus Tyrannus (2000) along with Woodruff's Antigone (2001) and a muscular new Oedipus at...

This new volume of three of Euripides' most celebrated plays offers graceful, economical, metrical translations that convey the wide range of effects of the playwright's verse, from the idiomatic speech of its dialogue to the high formality of its choral...

Mitchell-Boyask's Introduction gives the reader a lively and accessible overview of Euripides' life, the circumstances of the original performances, and critical debate on the three plays. Footnotes to the translations provide students with useful...

Aeschylus: The Libation Bearers; Euripides: Electra; Sophocles: Electra

'This is the best Prometheus Bound in English. Deborah Roberts' translation is accurate, readable, and true to the original in idiom, imagery, and the combination of a high style with occasional colloquialism. The informative notes and perceptive...

A dazzling display of William Shakespeare's fondness for wit and wordplay, Much Ado About Nothing is a high-spirited comedy, edited with notes by R.A. Foakes, and an introduction by Janet Dillon. 'Some, Cupid kills with arrows, some, with traps' Proud,...