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William Shakespeare; Clare Bevan ListingsIf you cannot find what you want on this page, then please use our search feature to search all our listings. Click on Title to view full description
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William Shakespeare; M. R. Ridley Antony and Cleopatra (Arden Shakespeare)
Methuen 1968 0416476309 / 9780416476309 paperback Very Good
VG+. No high-lighting or under-lining. Minimal reading/handling wear Antony and Cleopatra is one of the greatest love stories of all time, and one of the finest, and most poetic of all the high Shakespearean tragedies. Written between 1606 and 1607, it draws on the Roman historian Plutarch and his account of the collapse of the Roman Republic and the birth of the empire under Octavius Caesar, son of Julius. This imperial struggle for political power between Octavius, Lepidus, Pompey and Mark Antony provides the backdrop for the play's extraordinary evocation of the tempestuous love of Antony for Cleopatra, his 'Egyptian dish'. The play cuts back and forth between the cold, calculating realpolitik of imperial Rome, and the sensuous, erotic world of Egypt and Cleopatra's luxurious and hedonistic court. Yet what is most memorable about the play is its remarkably poetic language; its lush image of Cleopatra in her barge, 'like a burnished throne / Burned on the water', and 'beggared all description', and its erotic fusion of images of sex and death which find their ultimate culmination in the suicides of Antony and Cleopatra in the final scenes of the play. A notoriously elusive play for both critics and theatre directors alike, Antony and Cleopatra's fascination with questions of race, sex, death, power and politics makes it one of the most compelling of all of Shakespeare's plays. However, the stage is undoubtedly held by Cleopatra, and Enobarbus' attempt to explain her fascination, as powerful and evocative today as ever: 'Age cannot wither her, Nor custom stale her infinite variety'.
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0.99 GBP
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William Shakespeare The Taming of the Shrew (Oxford School Shakespeare)
Oxford University Press 1992 0198319762 / 9780198319764 Paperback Like New
An unread, uninscribed copy, in storage since publication, with minimal wear to cover One of the most controversial and problematic of all of Shakespeare's plays, The Taming of the Shrew is a typical Elizabethan domestic comedy written around 1592. Petruchio, a gentleman of Verona, arrives in Padua and announces to his friends that I come to wive it wealthily in Padua; / If wealthily, then happily in Padua. He soon finds that a group of men keen to marry Bianca, the younger daughter of rich old Baptista, are frustrated by her elder, shrewish sister, Katherine. There is much subsequent hilarity as Bianca's suitors make a bet with Petruchio that he cannot tame and marry Katherine. Despite Katherine's protestations, Petruchio goes ahead with the match, using deliberately unorthodox behaviour to confuse Katherine (including a scene where he starves her), claiming that this is the way to kill a wife with kindness. The play culminates with a scene of Katherine's apparently spontaneous subjection to her husband's will, where she places her hand beneath her husband's foot, and tells the other wives present that thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper. The play's gratuitous scenes of women being abused and vilified in the name of comedy has made many directors and critics very uncomfortable with the play, and many feminist critics have condemned contemporary productions of the play as reproducing certain 16th-century stereotypes concerning women who speak out against male authority. --Jerry Brotton
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4.99 GBP
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