Shakespeare Books

I found this to be far and away the best study guide, much better than Cliff's notes. A great help for either high school or college students. Thorough, scholarly, yet easy to understand.

The most helpful book for students in high school and college who want to understand Romeo and Juliet. A great help for taking part in class discussions, passing tests and writing papers. Easily outshines the competition because it is easier to use and understand. A great reference for both ordinary people and scholars.

The town of Verona provided the scenes
of a tradgedy spawned by some quarreling teens
Two of them, though, from two different clans
Met and then fell deep in love at a dance.

They were married in secet at a good Friar's place
Then the youth killed her cousin and left in disgrace.
Through a bad turn of fate she descovered him dead
And in desperation made her own death bed.

This tale of woe written by Shakespeare
Is a classic for all, and a story to hear.
Although a romantic and a tear-jerker too,
I do recommend it as reading for you.

The play of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare uses countless amounts of Metaphors, Similes, Oxymorons, Puns, Imagery, and foreshadowing! Take metaphors and similes for example they play would die without them. They help just about every character express the depth of their feeling. Then comes Puns, this play thrives off Puns. Puns are used as a form of comic relief throughout out the play. Just like puns, Oxymorons help in expressing the confused feelings of the characters to the audience and other characters, and are essential to the flow of the play. Last and one of the most important types of figurative language in the play is Imagery. How could Romeo compare Juliet to all these wonderful things without imagery? Without Imagery, this play could not have been such a success to the original audience, because there were not many props to suggest the scene!

I don't particularly care for shakespeare, having been forced to read so much of it in college. But I needed something for the wall of my office, something politically neutral and unoffensive. Something that projected a certain sense of class and style. Well, this artprint certainly fit the bill. I was enamored with the attention to detail and vivid colors. Many of my clients have commented on it as well. When I get a bigger office, I would like add additional titles from this series.

I don't particularly care for shakespeare, having been forced to read so much of it in college. But I needed something for the wall of my office, something politically neutral and unoffensive. Something that projected a certain sense of class and style. Well, this artprint certainly fit the bill. I was enamored with the attention to detail and vivid colors. Many of my clients have commented on it as well. When I get a bigger office, I would like add additional titles from this series.

Wonderful introduction to the real language of Shakespeare made accessible to even elementary age children.

I have read Romeo and Juliet in 6 different versions, but this one I really enjoyed. It's underdstandable and easy to read. Good for all ages !!!!

Calling all literary readers and writers! This is a must-read for you! Romeo and Juliet, as edited by Adolph Caso and published by the Dante University of America Foundation.

This is not a text; no, it is so much more. Personally, I found it a most rewarding adventure into my favorite activity--reading! Long before we had copyright laws that constrain creativity rather than elicit it, the storytellers of the times were able to hear a tale of wonder, enjoy it, explore it and then regurgitate it into an even greater masterpiece or, sometimes, into a moving poem, an artistic rendition of the story, or even a musical!

All of us have picked up a book and upon reading the first few pages may think that they have read it already--the theme is similar--but then the book takes off into an entirely different tale. Here, however, Adolph Caso brings to his readers what I have come to think of as "the evolution of the Romeo and Juliet story."

Caso has brought together the works of Masuccio Salernitano, Luigi DaPorto, Matteo Bandello, all Italian writers, inasmuch as the story originated in Italy--and William Shakespeare. You see, Shakespeare did not create and write Romeo and Juliet! Did you know that?

According to the Introduction, written by the editor, "a variant on the theme of Romeo and Juliet can be traced to the literatures of Greece and Rome, it received a unique and modern rendition with Masuccio Salernitan's thirty-third short story... It was amplified and modernized by Luigi DaPorto... given its definitive form by Matteo Bandello," and "immortalized by Shakespeare with his great masterpiece." (p. 7)

So what this book provides is the ability to study the same story, by four different authors. Personally, I prefer the story written by Matteo Bandello. By the way, Maurice Jonas translated the stories. I felt that Bandello's story probably more closely followed the actual story (Was this ever based upon a true story? I don't know).

The main thrust of the storyline is that while two families were feuding, a young girl of one family and a young man of the other family met purely by accident and fall in love!

All of the Italian versions place Juliet's age at 18, while Shakespeare moved the age to a much younger one. All of the Italian versions indicate that Romeo and Juliet are both dead at the end, while Shakespeare's rendition also includes that the man to whom Juliet was to be married, as arranged by her father, was also dead.

The style of poetic writing by Shakespeare is, of course, completely different from all of the others, and, indeed, is expansive in telling the story. It includes beautifully written passages that most of us have heard at one time or another:

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east and Juliet is the sun!...

As well as,

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?... (pps. 121-122)

This change in writing style by Shakespeare is exactly why I feel the book is a must-read for literary readers and writers. For it is in the reading, study and digestion of the evolved Romeo and Juliet that we may see and understand all that this beautiful story has to tell us.

Indeed, for those unfamiliar with the works of Shakespeare, this is a wonderful way by which you can begin--for the earlier versions ensure that you are totally familiar with the storyline before you begin the story as written by William Shakespeare.

I highly recommend Romeo and Juliet, not only as a wonderful novel, but also as a wonderful study in the writing and evolution of great literature.

I like how they are both different meaning different back grounds and how they didn't let the family stop their love for each other.

I've read all eight books in the "As Dreamed by Itsy" series to my 5 and 7 year olds. They're wonderful, all eight of them, so when you look at the others, you'll find this same review for all eight.

My kids loved them and wanted to hear them over an over. I noticed that with each reading, they comprehended a little more about the story. Even the first reading they loved and picked up a lot of information from, but they were so interested in the story to pay much attention to the concepts. After all, they didn't view the story as a lesson in science. On later readings they showed a great deal of interest and even awe at that the world really operates in such ways.

And me - I'm not a scientist, am even afraid of science, but this was easy. I picked up more from these stories than I learned in high school. Of course the kids asked questions I couldn't answer (but not too many), but they ask such questions every time we go to the park or the supermarket. I just passed off their questions in the usual way. Now when I someone says something about the Big Bang Theory, molecules or such, I feel well enough informed that I no longer quickly change the subject.

I recommend the books and hope the publisher adds more titles soon.

Most important - my six year old daughter liked it, wanted to hear it over and over. After twice through she could make the facial expressions to count from one to sixteen. Would that she could have learned base 10 numbers this quickly.

The book doesn't go into things like adding binary numbers - that would be too much. However, it did provide a basis so I'm going to use binaries to explain carrying when adding numbers. Binary numbers are so simple, she will be able to understand what carrying is all about.

At the level she is now, the book provided her with the concepts she needed to see how we build up larger and larger numbers. A couple of days ago she came to me and showed me how she could keep writing larger and larger ordinary numbers, to thousands, millions, billions . . . I'm sure it was hearing this book that let her figure it out.

If you never heard of binary numbers, your kid will enjoy it and you'll learn something too. If you know binary numbers, the book provides a foundation for you to expand upon. Either way, I recommend it.

Penn Leary has written an outstanding book that gives positive proof of the true authorship of the Shakespeare works. Anyone with an interest in either Shakespeare or ciphers will find this to be a fascinating book to read. His proof through his discovery of encripted ciphers in the Shakespeare works is well supported by both the Baconian society and scholars alike. Search the internet for 'Penn Leary' to find out more about this incredible discovery.

Through the science of Cryptanalysis, the name of Francis Bacon may be read as the First Word of Dialogue in the First Play in the First 1623 Edition of Shakespeare's Works, and in may other places. The writer is the author of a paper published in "Cryptologia," a respected Journal of Cryptography. Order from Amazon, $15. postpaid

This is not a true book, but a delightful book-shaped treasure chest filled with wonderful things to explore the age of Shakespeare. New and complete, "Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Age" contains a model of the Globe Theater to make; a Shakespearean timeline poster; Map of London from Shakespeare's time; Guide to the plays of Shakespeare; 32-page book about the immortal Bard; and a replica 16th-century printing set to make a personalized print poster (includes movable type and ink!!). This is a great gift for yourself and your favorite Shakespeare freak, young or old.

This is an excellent way to engage older children in exploring literature. There are activities as well as information on the life, times, and works of Shakespeare. It would be difficult for a child younger than nine or ten to complete the projects, but it would be excellent for an older child, especially as an introduction to one of Shakespeare's works. It allows a child to explore the time period as well as the theatre. It is well packaged in a very neat "book" with a drawer and compartments for the various parts; it is easy to store without losing the smaller parts. It even comes with a lock and key!

What makes a genius tick? What made Shakespeare tick? If Shakespeare's vision seems inexhaustible, all-encompassing, transcendental - one might say 'mythic' - then how did he manage it? Where did that vision come from? And where, while we're at it, did the *poetry* come from?

Many of the world's finest literary minds over the last 400 years have been drawn to such questions, and more than a few have made valuable strides towards the answers. But even so, you would search long and hard for a book to equal Ted Hughes' "Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being" - if it's those big questions that you're interested in.

Whilst no brief summary can really do this book justice, here's a rough attempt anyway...

1. For the last fifteen plays of his career (i.e. throughout his artistic maturity), Shakespeare consistently employed the same basic prototype plot structure - what Hughes calls his "Tragic Equation". That plot structure was derived from the inspired fusion of the plots of Shakespeare's two long narrative poems, "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece". Hughes demonstrates (with staggering thoroughness) that behind every major male protagonist (Troilus, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Lear etc.) is the god Adonis, and behind every female figure (Cressida, Gertrude/Ophelia, Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, Cordelia etc.) is the goddess Venus - or, more accurately, the Goddess of Complete Being.

This alone would make the book an astounding achievement of literary detective work. But there is much more to it than that...

2. By combining the two myths in this way, Shakespeare hit upon an unfailing source of dramatic (and poetic) power. Indeed, what he tapped into was virtually the power source of all human feeling itself. To understand this, think about myth and religion and what they seem to be, VIZ, the expression of our profoundest primal instincts, of our deepest psycho-biological mysteries. They are, if you like, the DNA code of our very souls. (Or to put it less ridiculously, they are the living artistic expression of everything we think and feel at our core.) Apollo, Dionysus, Aphrodite, Isis, Osiris, Horus, Jehovah, Allah, Christ, Mary, Krishna, Shiva - and countless others from around the planet - these gods (and their experiences and sufferings) embody our brightest truths and our darkest mysteries. Their stories are the stories of our collective consciousness.

3. This explains why Hamlet, Macbeth and Lear somehow feel like gods to us too: Shakespeare was quite deliberately forcing them to live out the mythic destiny of Adonis himself. Adonis is one of the oldest prototypes of the worldwide phenomenon of the sacrificed god; as such, he is a near relative of Osiris, Dionysus, Christ, and countless others - just as Venus/Lucrece is a first cousin of Isis, Demeter, the Virgin Mary, etc.

4. Moreover, Shakespeare's *mythic intuition* was somehow greater than other writers before or since. In other words, he discovered all the mythic possibilities of these two key stories - what exactly they were expressing. (Without going into *what* they do express, which is a key theme of Hughes' book, all I shall say here is that they are born of very deeply rooted impulses in all of us, that their key cultural manifestations are what Hughes terms "the Great Goddess and the Sacrificed God", and that they express, if you like, humanity's *tragic dilemma*.)

5. Once he discovered this mythic key to his imagination (i.e. the two poems explosively combined), Shakespeare could then dedicate his entire mature career to exploring the corridors it unlocked. He harnessed all the various potentialities of those deeply rooted ancient stories for his own Elizabethan dramas. To use a rather violent analogy, his 'Tragic Equation' was a kind of dramatist's atomic bomb: once he had discovered the essential nuclear reaction, he could go on finding new ways of inducing it, ways of making the explosion bigger or smaller, and even finally - in "The Tempest" - how to prevent the explosion from occurring at all. He spent twelve years pursuing this obsession, and the results speak for themselves.

6. Indeed, Hughes goes on to show that it's always at the same particular moment in each play (i.e. when "Venus and Adonis" metamorphoses into "The Rape of Lucrece" (and in the late plays, back again)) that Shakespeare's poetry takes off to ever-greater heights. In other words, Hughes argues that by touching the primal mythic sources of the human imagination (where the two myths collide), Shakespeare gains direct access to his Muse. He touches the vision itself, and records its feel in his poetry.

"Shakespeare and The Goddess of Complete Being" is a work that forces itself upon your imagination and stays there. It is not, however, for the skim reader. It requires dedicated concentration and some considerable patience for complex, detailed argument. It also needs a fairly healthy knowledge of up to a dozen or so of the mature plays - you might need to get out your edition of the Complete Works and start revising.

Yet for all that, this book is a real joy to read. Its luminous prose could only come from a poet of Hughes' own calibre; its massive scope (compassing everything from the shamanic initiation dream of a Siberian Goldi leader to Occult Neoplatonism in Renaissance Europe) is endlessly exciting and surprising; and its ear for Shakespeare's poetry and eye for his mythological allusion is virtually unparalleled.

But it's really for the insights into the nature of genius that this book is truly unforgettable. By the time you've reached "Our revels now are ended..." (at the end of the long dramatic sequence), Hughes has shown you exactly *how* Shakespeare keeps managing to follow his Muse up to ever more dizzying heights - almost as if you're a passenger on the journey with him. And *that*, for a 'mere' work of literary criticism, is surely astonishing.

Everyone who has read this book has said it was the best book on Shakespeare they have ever read. So why is it still out of print? This book needs to be republished with a new cover (possibly with the goddess instead of the boar?), and it needs an index, perhaps instead of the outline form table of contents. It is a classic!

Rob Watson is probably the greatest mind in America. There is very little else I can say

With his sword, Macbeth hacks a passage through the enemy and unseams the traitor Macdonwald from the nave to the chops. He emerges from the battle like a man newborn (but into what?) and gets a new title: Thane of Cawdor. In *Coriolanus* Caius Martius runs through the gates ("gates" are a familiar Renaissance term for female genitalia) of Corioles, emerges very bloody and very triumphant and gets a new name: Coriolanus. Thus, goes Watson's provocative and compelling argument, both men cut themselves off from family names and through the violent action reminiscent of a self-inflicted C-section (remember Macbeth's hacking away at that fleshly passage) make themselves anew. Problems follow. Not merely because these men are ambitious, but because, as endless numbers of Elizabethan prodigal son tales point out (Watson has really done his research), you just can't get away from family. You're linked whether or not you like it, and, for that matter, whether or not you're a tragic hero or a college student who has to go home for Thanksgiving. Watson deals with other plays, but his treatment of these is most compelling and far more subtle than I can indicate here. This book won a prize when it came out: best book produced by Harvard University Press. The prize is well-deserved. Having read *Shakespeare and the Hazards of Ambition*, I have never been able to teach these plays in the same way again. This book almost lets the reader see too much -- it gives me the shivers. And it belongs on every serious scholar's shelf.