During her career popular children's writer Edith Nesbit collaborated on over sixty books of fiction for children. In «Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare» she turns her attention to a series of interpretations of William Shakespeare's works. These retellings of Shakespeare's plays are written in a way that can be easily understood by and entertaining to young readers. «Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare» includes a short biography ...
Widely accepted as Shakespeare's earliest tragedy, «Titus Andronicus» is the bloody story of a Roman general engaged in terrible revenge with the Queen of the Goths, Tamora. The play begins with Titus returning to Rome after ten years of fighting. He brings with him the defeated Tamora, Queen of the Goths, and her sons. Titus sacrifices one of Tamora's sons to avenge the sons he lost in the war, which begins a cycle of revenge in which ...
Perhaps the most philosophical of the three Theban plays, «Oedipus at Colonus» continues the story begun in «Oedipus the King.» Oedipus is a blind beggar, tainted by his past, and nearing the end of his life. He travels with his daughter, Antigone, until they reach the holy ground of the Furies, which coincides with the prophecy of his place of death. There he is sought after by the warring kings of Athens and Thebes, for his final resting place ...
Euripides, along was Sophocles and Aeschylus, is responsible for the rise of Greek tragedy. It was in the 5th Century BC, during the height of Greece's cultural bloom, that Euripides lived and worked. Of his roughly ninety-two plays, only seventeen tragedies survive. Both ridiculed and lauded during his life, Euripides now stands as an innovator of the Greek drama. Here, in «Iphigenia Among the Taurians» is an escape play with a familiar ca ...
William Shakespeare's «Antony and Cleopatra» is the historical drama based on the lives of its title characters. Mark Antony is part of the ruling triumvirate of Rome and at the outset of the play he is living in Egypt engaged in an affair with the beautiful Egyptian Queen, Cleopatra. When the word that his wife has died and that Pompey is raising an army to challenge the authority of the triumvirate, Mark Antony returns to Rome to help man ...
Euripides (480 BC-406 BC) is revered as one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, and produced the largest body of extant work by any ancient playwright. He is considered to be the most modern of the three, and he laid the foundation for Western theatre. His work sticks out from that of his contemporaries because of his colloquial vocabulary, meter and syntax, distinct from the grandiose language ...
Euripides turned to playwriting at a young age, achieving his first victory in the dramatic competitions of the Athenian City Dionysia in 441 b.c.e. He would be awarded this honor three more times in his life, and once more posthumously. His plays are often ironic, pessimistic, and display radical rejection of classical decorum and rules. In 408 b.c.e., Euripides left worn-torn Athens for Macedonia, upon the invitation of King Archelaus, and the ...
"The Sonnets and Narrative Poems" collects together all the non-dramatic poetry of William Shakespeare. While Shakespeare is known best for his plays he also wrote numerous love sonnets and a handful of narrative poems which are excellent literary works in their own right. The narrative poems include two erotically themed works, «Venus and Adonis» and «The Rape of Lucrece» as well as the romantic narratives of «A Lover's Complaint» and ...
Euripides turned to playwriting at a young age, achieving his first victory in the dramatic competitions of the Athenian City Dionysia in 441 b.c.e. He would be awarded this honor three more times in his life, and once more posthumously. Together with Aeschylus and Sophocles, Euripides would provide the canon of Greek tragedy and thereby lay the foundation of Western theatre. Eighteen of Euripides' ninety-two works remain today, making his ...
