Classic and pre-20th century plays Books

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...

This new comic-book version of Euripides' classic The Trojan Women follows the fates of Hekabe, Andromache and Kassandra after Troy has been sacked and all its men killed. Trojan Women is a wildly imaginative collaboration between the visual artist...

Friedrich Hlderlin was one of Europe's greatest poets. The strange and beautiful language of his late poems is recreated by David Constantine in these remarkable verse translations. This is a new expanded edition of Constantine's widely-praised Hlderlin...

William Shakespeare is arguably themost pivotal and widely read figure in the history of English literature. This comprehensivecollection highlights some of the bard's best works, adapted to be more easilyread and digestible for children.Featured within...

The Darker Face of the Earth, a play by the poet laureate of the United States, creates a human drama of classical proportions. Behind the facade of antebellum Southern plantation life unfolds a mysterious tale of interracial love and strife, guilt and...

'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's tutor: The influence of Thomas Kyd adds to the critical and scholarly discussion that seeks to establish the early modern playwright Thomas Kyd's dramatic canon, and indicates where and how Kyd contributed to the development of...

This book presents an important re-theorisation of gender and anti-Semitism in medieval biblical drama. It charts conflicts staged between dramatic personae in plays that represent theological transitions, including the Incarnation, Flood, Nativity and...

In exploring links between the early modern English theatre and France, Richard Hillman focuses on Shakespeare's deployment of genres whose dominant Italian models and affinities might seem to leave little scope for French ones. The author draws on...

This engaging and stimulating book argues that Shakespeare's plays significantly influenced movie genres in the twentieth century, particularly in films concerning love in the classic Hollywood period. Shakespeare's 'green world' has a close functional...

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...

A Sensation Novel (1871) is a comic musical by W. S. Sullivan. First performed at the Royal Gallery of Illustration in January 1871, A Sensation Novel is one of Gilbert's collaborations with composer Thomas German Reed, whose German Reed Entertainments...

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...

When a reverend disapproves of his daughter's suitor, he manipulates the church in an effort to discourage their union and find a more favorable partner. It is a drastic decision that effects those inside and outside of the congregation. Rev. William...

The son of the rajah of Chutneypore falls in love with a nautch dancer, which disturbs the political order causing a rift between the powers-that-be. It's a love story plagued by outside interference from both family and friends. Indru is the young son...

The Private Secretary (1883) is a three-act comedy by English actor and playwright Charles Hawtrey. Adapted from a popular German farce, The Private Secretary helped launch Hawtrey's career as one of Victorian England's leading theatrical figures...

Johannes Rosmer is a respected member of a conservative community, who's criticized for his close friendship with a young woman following his wife's untimely death. Johannes' unconventional living situation, paired with his growing liberal beliefs,...

Set in Malta, a European island off the coast of Italy, The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe follows a rich Jewish merchant, Barabas, who enjoys the privileges that his wealth allows. When the governor of Malta, Ferneze,...

When Edward becomes king, he uses his new authority to pardon his favorite nobleman, Piers Gaveston, from his exile, angering key supporters. Soon after he inherits the throne, King Edward of England writes a letter to his favorite nobleman, Piers...

Lady Windermere misinterprets her husband's interest in an older woman, Mrs. Erlynne, causing a rift that could lead to both marital and societal ruin.Lady Windermere's Fan Is an intriguing tale that examines intention versus outcome in a world driven...

Ivanov (1889) is a drama in four acts by Russian writer Anton Chekhov. Written in ten days, the play premiered in 1887 at Moscow's Korsh Theatre and was initially a failure due to its rushed composition, production issues, and significant changes made to...

Raina Petkoff has grand ideas about heroism and war that are soon thwarted by a Swiss solider using her bedroom to hide from the authorities.Arms and the Man is a three act play that's filled with insightful observations about politics, tradition and...

"Chekhov, speaking simply and never otherwise than as an artist and a humane man, shows us in fullness and plenitude the mystery of our lives."-Eudora Welty"What writers influenced me as a young man? Chekhov! As a dramatist? Chekhov! As a story writer?...

Chitra: A Play in One Act (1914) is a play by Rabindranath Tagore. Published following his ascension to international fame with the 1912 Nobel Prize in Literature, the play is based on the story of Chitrangada and Arjuna from Sanskrit epic Mahabharata...

The Taming of the Shrew (1592) is a comedy by William Shakespeare. Written between 1590 and 1592, The Taming of the Shrew is one of Shakespeare's earliest works. Frequently critiqued by scholars for its demeaning portrayal of Katherina and for...

Hamlet (1601) is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. Inspired by Danish historian Saxo Grammatica's legend of Amleth, which Shakespeare likely encountered in a retelling by French scholar Francois de Belleforest, Hamlet was written sometime between 1599...

Antony and Cleopatra (1607) is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. Inspired by Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives-a series of biographies on influential figures of the ancient world-Shakespeare wrote Antony and Cleopatra sometime between 1599...