Shakespeare Books

I used this as an experiment to see if my 10-year-old and her 9-year-old friend could read and understand the storyline of a Shakespearean play. The verdict?? THEY DID!! I asked them to summarize the plot and they did it with total accuracy. What a cool thing!!
I loved this and you will, too!

As a homeschooling parent I was looking for a way to introduce Shakespeare to my kids (9 and 10) -- they have loved these stories -- which we read aloud and then discussed (plot, characters, themes, conflicts, setting, motivations, etc.) -- the verse is enjoyable and effectively incorporates selected passages from the original in a seamless way. My kids have also enjoyed the illustrations and writing samples (all by 2nd-3rd graders) included in each book. After we read R&J, we watched the old Zefferelli film version and my kids got much more out of it. We've also read the Evelyn Nesbit prose versions but they didn't "feel" like Shakespeare the way these do...I have already purchased the exisitng Burdett versions and hope she has others in mind (PLEASE do Merchant of Venice!).

As a homeschooling parent I was looking for a way to introduce Shakespeare to my kids (9 and 10) -- they have loved these stories -- which we read aloud and then discussed (plot, characters, themes, conflicts, setting, motivations, etc.) -- the verse is enjoyable and effectively incorporates selected passages from the original in a seamless way. My kids have also enjoyed the illustrations and writing samples (all by 2nd-3rd graders) included in each book. After we read R&J, we watched the old Zefferelli film version and my kids got much more out of it. We've also read the Evelyn Nesbit prose versions but they didn't "feel" like Shakespeare the way these do...I have already purchased the exisitng Burdett versions and hope she has others in mind (PLEASE do Merchant of Venice!).

Most adults know the story of Romeo and Juliet. The play, about two rash, emotionally-driven, and passionate teenagers from rival families who fall in love, become engaged, married, and each commit suicide within a span of less than a week, is standard curriculum for freshmen high school students in the United States. I've read and looked at many editions of the play and the Red Reader version is one of the better versions to use with high school freshmen. Each scene opens with an excellent synopsis of the scene. In addition, throughout the text are wonderful side annotations that connect the text to pop cultural references and modern slang. I liked using the text with my classes because it gives an excellent understanding of the story of the play and the larger themes involved. However, the one major complaint that my students had was that the Red Reader didn't give the definitions of enough words. ROMEO AND JULIET isn't one of the best Shakespeare plays and nor is it one of my Shakespearean favorites. Yet, it is one of the most popular of the bards plays and is one that every adult should be familiar. If you're reading Shakespeare for the first time, ROMEO AND JULIET is a great play to start with and the Red Reader version of the play is one of the best versions to help one's understanding of what is going on. Highly recommended for students who find themselves struggling with Shakespeare and for high school teachers who teach the play.

This text is a wonderful tool to help young people understand Shakespeare's most famous tragedy. I used this text to teach R & J to my freshman class, and they enjoyed the references to pop culture. I learned a lot, too, from the annotations. The editor who added the comments did a wonderful job of putting in information and interpretations that help the reader understand the big picture. He doesn't throw in esoteric trivia to show off his Shakespeare knowledge. The mix of humor and good, solid information makes navigating the play much simpler for young people. I believe the Bard would approve!

Traditional Romeo and Juliet-- but with hilarious coments on the margins explaining what's going on in normal English, and funny descriptions of the characters. Example:
Romeo- A 14-year-old lovesick dude in love with being in love; Lord Montague's only son.

Lord Capulet- Juliet's pop and a strait-up control [man].

Juliet- 13 years old, Lord Capulet's only daughter, and Romeo's eventual main squeeze.

Funny funny??? yes??? Just Really good----- very good version, some ghetto-style comments thrown in makes it really easy to understand.

As an introduction to our Shakespeare unit in my 12th grade AP English class, I divided the kids into two groups. One group prepared King Lear, and the other prepared The Taming of the Shrew. I gave them 4 class periods to prepare, then we had two days of performances. The kids added their own touches to the props in the box and suggested list of additional props. Other teachers brought their classes, and everyone had a great time.

Back in 2000, when Carl Martin first started selling his Home Shakespeare Festival, I bought his "Macbeth". I was going home for Christmas, and told friends and family to get ready to put on a play. The directions and set-up of the kit are fantastic, and couldn't possibly make it any easier. It even tells you which parts can be played by the same people, if you don't have enough bodies. And don't worry about costuming - we just set out a tablefull of my mom's aprons and scarves and told people to dress themselves for their part!

We had all ages participating, from 5 year olds (who played Birnham Wood) to retired people. Everybody from total hams (my six-foot brother as Lady McBeth) to shyer types (who had roles as prop managers and small one-line speaking roles) got into it. People still tell me it was one of the best parties they've every gone to - where else could you see someone holding a cabbage, and have to pretend it's a skull? Though I haven't had a King Lear party yet, I highly recommend the Home Shakespeare Festival as a total hoot. Don't forget to have someone videotape it! This is TOTALLY not-just-for-kids!

I am teaching King Lear for the first time next year. Having taught R/J, Macbeth, and Richard III, I found King Lear to be a little more intimidating. Teachers are constantly looking for anticipatory sets and this is the one! It gives the major facts in an abridged form while using the original language. It is also compeletly student driven (from director to actors). Casting is flexible from 6-12; for bogger classes I plan on staging two productions. Originally designed for parties (students will hardly believe people do this in their off-time), this is a great way to introduce one of Shakespeare's best and most tragic plays!

I'm writing this not so much to recommend a wonderful product -- if you want to get people interested in something, you have them _do_ it, rather than read about it -- but to post a mini-memorial for my friend, Bill Hamlin, who passed on in February. (I can't include a URL, but you can learn about him by Googling "bill hamlin" + gentleman.)

I gave Bill copies of "The Taming of the Shrew" and "King Lear". He and his fellow actors performed "Shrew" at a party and thoroughly enjoyed it. Perhaps the best thing about these sets (besides the rubber eyeballs in "Lear") is the way the parts are divided up so that just a few people can perform the play.

A great deal of fun. Recommended without reservation.

I bought this kit on sale at my local bookstore and it has turned out to be money very well spent! My friends and I had so much fun putting it on this weekend! It took a little longer than the kit said to get everything together at the beginning, but no longer than 30 minutes. There were 8 of us and 11 parts, so the "doubling chart" came in handy.
My biggest question when I bought it was would I be able to use it more than once? The answer, it turns out, is yes! We all decided that we would gladly do it again. We are all eager to try a different part or invite other friends to play with us.

We bought the "Taming fo the Shrew" box because we knew that the box contained a blond wig, funny glasses and a broken recorder. The kids just had to have the props. But what I didn't expect was how enthusiastic the whole group of kids was to perform the play at our family reunion. It truly took about 30 minutes for the kids, ages 11-14 (with one adult present but not presiding), to assign all the parts, quickly rehearse and get their act together. The play has been perfectly abridged so that it makes sense to the kids as well as to their audience and is such a great way to entertain at a family or social gathering, much better than "How to Host a Murder" which is so much more work than this. My only advice would be to go over the pronuciation of all names with the whole "cast" before show time. There were a few glitches, but it all made for bigger laughs! (Wish there were more than just the two sets!)

This is a great resource for any English teacher planning to teach one of these 3 plays. The lessons are very well-written and creative with step-by-step instructions! Excellent resource for any teacher who wants his or her students to learn through performance!

I have used this book to teach Macbeth to 7th graders, and I know several high school teachers who swear by it for grades 9 - 12. It contains helpful critical articles to keep teachers up to date on the latest research in the field, as well as day by day lesson plans. Each unit plan is for about 30 days and contains a variety of performance, film analysis, and close reading lessons as well as quizzes, project topics, and final assignments. Lessons can be easily adapted to fit any grade level, required lesson plan structure, or set of state standards. This is the only book you need to buy.

Do you have HS students who just don't get Shakespeare? Don't even bother because of the language? Here's the book to break the Shakespeare language barrier. I bought this book for a "secondary English class" at college, since then I have bought one for a friend who teaches drama and I have suggested it to all the 9th and 10th grade English teachers at my high school. The three Shapespeare plays this lesson book covers: Midsummer's Night Dream, MacBeth, and Romeo and Juliette. The authors set it up nicely with a calendar for each selection and approximately 22 lessons in each selection. They provided the objective, the materials list, the lesson, any handouts, homework ideas and questions for reflection. All lessons are formated to include some form of kinesiology, i.e. the students wll have to get out of their seats and move around. Some of my favorites...tossing lines, yelling insults, building a shoebox set and stressing the subtext. There are also many essays in the beginning to help the teacher discover more about the connection to main themes and ideas within the Shakespeare experience.

And the best thing was...I am now using some of the ideas for other text which are difficlt for the HS student!

When I took my long service leave, I bought Garfield's books of Shakespeare's Stories (both volumes) and I hired videos of Shakespeare's plays. Working with these and the texts of the plays, I gave myself a course in Shakespeare's plays. It was one of the highlights of my life.

I had supposed the Laurence Olivier was some pompous old fart with a plum in his mouth. He is ELECTRIC. His Hamlet is a study in depression. His voice in "To be or not to be" is scarcely audible but carries so much emotion.

In all, I watched 22 different plays - my favourites, Richard 11 and Hamlet, in several different versions. I followed the BBC series which uses the same actors from one play to the next so that the Duke of Gloucester in one play is played by the same actor who later becomes Richard 11 in the next play.

Leon Garfield's story-telling with its light touch of irony and its perfect choice of words opened a door that I had assumed was marked "Other people only". Garfield wrote marvellous children's book and I've read them all but these books are the best of his achievements and they've made a big difference to my life.

These are stunningly well told versions of the plays.

They give not only the story, but a wonderful sense of the theatrical - you read and enjoy a visual sensation as well as the speech of Shakespeare (all the words 'spoken' are taken directly from Shakespeare's scripts).

Romeo and Juliet, for example, sweats in the heat of Verona. There is a fantastic image of wasps fighting! You go directly into the story - and moral considerations are there.

The pictures support the text well- giving yet another dimension to the book.

Forget Lamb!

I've used these stories in the classroom for many years now - partly because young people (11 through to much older!) relate to them -but also because I really enjoy re-reading them.

(There is a whole set of Abridged Shakspeare by Garfield too - and wonderful Animations done with Russian animators!)

Excellent choice for English teachers who want to review Shakespeare's classics with students. I have also used this with my middle school students to introduce them to Shakespeare. The stories are written in clear language so that students will be able to understand the wonderful stories of the bard without being intimidated by Shakespearean language A must for all English teachers!

There are thousands of biographies of Shakespeare. Picking which to read can be a challenge. "Shakespeare the Player," by John Southworth, is the third Shakespeare biography I've read. I recommend it highly for its passion, its premise and its detail. This book leaves you with an appreciation of, not just the writer of the most famous plays in the world, but the actors he wrote FOR and the roles he played IN. In a readable, well-organised presentation, Southworth turns Shakespeare the austere genius into Shakespeare the warm human being.

Shakespeare learned his craft by acting first and writing second, contrary to conventional treatments of his life. These are the points that struck my interest:
. Shakespeare the apprentice actor, playing roles in other writers' works, learning to be part of a team of players, learning to read an audience's reactions, learning to read fellow actors' abilities
. Shakespeare the company sharer, investing in his company when he had the experience and money, becoming a stakeholder whose written plays were part but not all of his substantial contributions to the success of the team
. Writing specific parts that fit specific actors
. Emphasis on time on tour as well as at home in London

Southworth is an actor and director who brings experience and research to provide supporting detail for his points:
. Superb familiarity with the plays and lines (making the most readable and engaging summary of Shakespeare's works I've ever seen)
. Examples of influences of lines from other Elizabethan plays, in which Shakespeare performed as an apprentice, on lines in his earliest written plays (showing influence on his development as a writer from his experience as an apprentice).
. Line by line comparisons of Sonnets and Plays (and discussing how Shakespeare's love for plays was greater than his love for poems)
. What roles Shakespeare would have played (kingly but not always the king; roles that allowed him to coach apprentices and influence performance tone and style of the overall play during rehearsal)
. What roles his fellow actors and apprentices would have played (roles for his fellow veterans, roles for the apprentices showing them off and developing them into experienced veterans in their own right)
. Queen Elizabeth's and King James' support for players in general and Shakespeare's companies in particular (and the differences in plays that the two respective monarchs preferred)

This book, and SHAKESPEARE OF LONDON by Marchette Chute, are the only works known to me on Shakespeare that emphasize his work as an actor-director. Once one is reminded that Shakespeare was one of the leading actors in the various companies in which he worked and for whom he wrote, much of his life and career arc make far better sense than they do in the usual biographies that concentrate exclusively on his writing, as if he sat every night in a rented room and generated page after page with no actors or theater in mind. It also supplies a very different picture of how the members of any given successful group of players spent the year, particularly in its demonstration that even players with a dedicated, available playhouse in London still necessarily spent a good part of each year on tour.

Any discussion of the details of any part of Shakespeare's life is necessarily 99% speculation and 1% ambiguous documentation. However, Southworth's guesses as to the roles taken or preferred by Shakespeare in his own plays are soundly based on Southworth's lifelong experience as an actor in many performances of most of the Bard's plays, and generally made sense to me. It would be fascinating to get some clearer idea of the roles he took in the plays of Jonson and Marlowe, and Southworth does make some guesses, at least for the Marlowe plays that had the most obvious influence on Shakespeare's own earliest plays.

Southworth pictures Shakespeare as a whole-hearted "man of the theater" from well before his hasty marriage until just a few weeks before his untimely death in his early 50s. It's a picture that is consistent with what we know about the Elizabethan and Jacobian theater, and which remains consistent with the few documents that place Shakespeare at any given spot at any given time, doing any specific thing.

In short, it's a highly-recommended eye-opener.

As an academic, I could resent the sometimes acerbic references to academics in John Southworth's Shakespeare the Player, but as an academic I learned more from this non-academic book than I have learned from many academic books on Shakeespeare. The book is written by aprofessional theater person, an actor/director, who has a thorough knowledge of Shakespeare's plays and of the interactions among casts and playwrights and stages and plays and performances. From this background, he proposes and credibly supports four lines of argument: a) that there cannot be any lost years in Shakespeare's biography: to do what he did, Shakespeare had to have had an extensive apprenticeship in the theater, and Southworth adds evidence in support of the theory that this was Leceister's company; b) that there is no credible evidence that Shakespeare ever retired from the theater, and much circumstantial evidence from theater lives to suggest that he did no such thing; c) that Shakespeare was primarily an actor/director in his own plays, and not primarily a playwright, in his own eyes and the eyes of his colleagues; and d) that the roles he chose for himself, roles like Iago in "Othello," were characterized by being somewhat detached from the action, frequency of appearance on stage even when not speaking, and often a kind of controlling relationship with the other characters. The style is clear, unpretentions and very readable, the presentation direct, knowledgeable and carefully argued with detailed and credible evidence. I found the book to be the most helpful single book in illuminating Shakespeare and his plays that I've read in the last ten years.

Book arrived in the late afternoon, I started reading and didn't get to bed till 10 AM the next morning. A stunning detective story.

This book introduced the revolutionary idea that an aristocrat named Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550- 1604), wrote the works of Shakespeare under a psuedonym. Oxford is now considered the leading candidate for the authorship of the Shakespeare canon largely because of the influence this book has had over a 75 year period. It first addresses the documentary evidence "against" Will Shakspere from Stratford as the author, then presents the positive evidence on behalf of Oxford as author. The evidence for Oxford is detailed and circumstantial: literary and intellectual parallels in the works of Oxford and Shakespeare; parallels in the life of Oxford, his family and friends and the plots of the Shakespeare plays; topical references in the plays that pre-date the time during which Shakespeare allegedly wrote the works; professional, political and historical knowledge displayed in the plays for which the Stratford actor could not have had the training or access; and so on. Exhaustive research; excellent organization of materials; superbly written. A book that academics have not been able to refute since its publication in 1920.

(And by the way, it's pronounced "Loney.") I can't add much to the other positive reviews of this ground-breaking book. Written well, convincing...long live the Earl of Oxford--"Though I once gone to all the world must die" indeed!!

Let me be very clear as to why I give this book a full five stars... it makes Shakespeare's sonnets readily accessible/understandable to the average common reader (which I consider myself to be). This Arden version has become a treasure to me. I have loved W.S.'s sonnets ever since committing #116 (my favorite) to memory a few years ago, but I admit that many of them have left me with one profound thought at the end of the fourteenth line, and that thought is... "huh"? It is truly a sad predicament to be left in such a state of ignorance when Shakespeare is ALWAYS saying something AWESOME! But this book has come closest to a complete cure for me. I am now seldom (if ever) left in the dark by an obscure phrase, line, or context, because the notes on the opposing page are right there to help me through those exact points of difficulty. I unreservedly recommend this affordably priced 3rd Series edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones to any and all sonnet lovers. Let it "give physic" to your ailment.

P.S. It begins with an excellent over 100 page introduction and follows the sonnets with an equally great exposition of "A Lover's Complaint".

This is a nicely bound, low priced volume of Shakespeare's sonnets. But it is more than just that. Each sonnet is on a page by itself with explanatory notes on the facing page. While most of us do not need a spoon-feeding of these wonderful works, we sometimes do come to an abrupt halt at "some in their garments like new-fangled ill", or "sometimes a blusterer that the ruffle knew of court". In the above instances we are talking about fashionable but absurd garments, and a braggart's display. Also, many elisions are changed to modern words (e.g. advised for aduis'd) except where such a change would hinder the flow of the sonnet. There are also over 100 pages of historical and critical comments at the front of the book, which you can read or ignore as you choose.

All in all this is an excellent package of the sonnets with a very useful set of notes. It's great that all of the notes are adjacent to the sonnets, so that you do not have to page back and forth, and that there are no nasty little note reference numbers marring the lines of the sonnets.

This is a nicely bound, low priced volume of Shakespeare's sonnets. But it is more than just that. Each sonnet is on a page by itself with explanatory notes on the facing page. While most of us do not need a spoon-feeding of these wonderful works, we sometimes do come to an abrupt halt at "some in their garments like new-fangled ill", or "sometimes a blusterer that the ruffle knew of court". In the above instances we are talking about fashionable but absurd garments, and a braggart's display. Also, many elisions are changed to modern words (e.g. advised for aduis'd) except where such a change would hinder the flow of the sonnet. There are also over 100 pages of historical and critical comments at the front of the book, which you can read or ignore as you choose.

All in all this is an excellent package of the sonnets with a very useful set of notes. It's great that all of the notes are adjacent to the sonnets, so that you do not have to page back and forth, and that there are no nasty little note reference numbers marring the lines of the sonnets.

This is an outstanding book/monograph on that famously puzzling play of Shakespeare. Best of all is that this introduction to Hamlet includes--however briefly--astute comparisons between dialogue in William Shakespeare's Hamlet and in Samuel Beckett's work in general. That is bound to encourage the student or general reader to make some comparative investigations of his own. And that isn't the only time Cantor makes such an intriguing, sound observation. Shakespeare has a good steward here.

This is the best boook on Hamlet available. No brief post can do it justice. If you are a student of Hamlet, get this book.

This is a great introduction to the play within a Reniassance context. The author does an admirable job in reconstructing the historical and literary contexts surrounding Hamlet. For example, the conflict which the play embodies between classical ideals of heroism and Christian skepticism is well-developed. Overall, this is the best place to begin any study of Hamlet, and it may be all you'll need. The language is clear and concise, in contrast to the pompous jargon-laden prose of so many "post-modern'" critics. Well-written, well-argued, well-informed: one of the best works available on this quintessential Renaissance play.