Shakespeare Books

With the original text on the left page, the easy to understand modern text on the right-hand page, this is a can't miss edition. The best of both worlds, his and ours, and Henry IV never fails to deliver.

We all need our Hals and Hotspurs. And, yes, we need our Falstaffs as well.

An exceptional presentation of an exceptional work.

In the second part of this drama, the main thread is the evolution of Prince Hal, future Henry V, from a young, irresponsible, and party-animal lad into a real monarch. Please note that, from the author's persepctive (and most likely yours) this is not any good, since it leads to the inevitable estrangement between the former comrades Hal and Sir John Falstaff, the leader of Hal's group of troublesome (and even criminal) friends. This develpoment will eventually hurt Falstaff very much, for he has come to see Hal as the son he never had. Little by little, Hal shows his true colors: like many heirs of power, he becomes cruel, cold, ambitious and mean. He marches away from his joyful past and starts to assume the reins of power. He has become a politician and a warrior. In the meantime, Henry IV's strength has greatly diminished from so many worries and fighting. Hal helps him defeat their enemies and in the end the King dies and Hal becomes Henry V. In the painful final scene, Falstaff greets the new monarch, only to receive an order of imprisonment from his former friend.

Just as in Part I, here the main character is Falstaff. The fat Sir displays all his power of enchantment over the reader, by way of his infinite jest, wit and cynicism. He surges over the other characters as the greast transgressor, the great Dyonisian spirit, full of vitality and assuredness.

Shakespeare's most salient features shine here as in the rest of his work: the fact that the characters change during the plays gives them a lot of literary power.

Surely this is not a review of the Shakespeare's play. I am not in a position to say anything about Shakespeare except it's something like an addiction. After you read a few of his plays in the original - everything else looks pale, like a comics book more or less.

This is about Folger Shakespeare Library. I read Hamlet, Tempest and Henry IV Part I and Part II in their editions. They are amazingly good. I can't find enough words. Five stars is not enough for them.

I read "The Merchant of Venice" in "The Annotated Shakespeare" - you can't even compare it with the Folger Library editions, which adds so much value for the contemporary reader both with their line by line commentary and with their articles before and after the play.

Simply the best.

These ArkAngel Audio CDs really convey the vibrance of Shakespeare's world complete with bawdy screams, clinking glasses in taverns, birds chirping in the forest, etc. It's "Shakespeare for people who hate Shakespeare" in the sense that when you listen to these CDs the meanings of lines and the essence of the play comes across easily by virtue of the inflections in the voices and the circumstances.

Shakespeare is so often mistaught in schools, "overcooked," as it were, in that the endless stream of complexities in individual lines are overanalyzed to death before anyone has developed an overall sense of what's going on in the play. These CDs will give you that sense and much more. The guy who plays Falstaff had me laughing out loud. Also, using a CD like this is not "cheating" -- just the opposite, it is the *right* way to approach Shakespeare because these are plays! They are meant, first and foremost, to be performed, not read. For students I would recommend listening *first* to get an overall sense, then going back and reading, then listening again. Reading will be much more productive and fun, I imagine.

Item was delivered in a matter of a few days and in perfect condition; performances of readers is wonderful

This edition of the Hamlet letters is a pirate edition as is that of capra press from the late 1980s. The copyright is held by Carrefour archives and a new edition is planned. there are many other carrefour Press titles which deal with hamlet letters in some way. If you require further details contact me karlorend@yahoo.com

I cannot believe that no one has reviewed this book yet. Brenda James first book on Henry Neville, "The Truth Will Out" was brilliant too.

The code referred to here is in the 144 letter dedication to the first edition of Shakespeare's sonnets. Put it into a 12 x 12 letter grid - actually 12 vertical columns of 12 letters - and move the colums 4 times as instructed in the last line of the dedication - and hey presto - you get a full sentence thanking the printer Thorpe for hiding the poet.

Transform the 12x12 grid 4 times - into 13x11, 14x10, 15x9 - and hey presto - you get Henry Poet Nevell. Henry in a pure vertical line, and Poet horizontally below Henry. The letters that make up Nevell are wrapped around the word Poet. That is if I remember correctly.

I tried doing it myself with bits of paper - in 12 columns - and it is more difficult than you think. I made several mistakes shuffling the bits around - and I kept doing it back to front - there is some complexity to the reshuffling, though not a huge deal. Enough to get me completely confused - but I persevered until I found my mistake - a mistake made early on in the reshuffling ruins everything!

A real subtlety in the 12x12 matrix is that that one square is blank - and one square has two letters on it - Mr. If you look at the original inscription in the 1609 edition - and it has to be THE original - you will see the extra space, and the closeness of the M and R. It took Brenda James years to figure it out - she actually took the trouble of memorising the WHOLE thing as she tried to figure it out. Her research around the subject of the coding done in that era is solid - and such coding systems were in use right across Europe - all important written messages had to be coded in case they fell into the wrong hands.

When I first started trying to reorder the columns I kept doing it back to front - the way it has to be done is counter intuitive.

Anyway it is quite startling to see the words jump out of a complete jumble. Just as startling to me was to discover that the 46th word of the 46th Psalm in the King James Bible is Shake, and the 46th word up from the bottom of the same Psalm is Spear! The VERY first line of Ben Jonson's dedicatory poem in the first Folio, which he put together in 1622/3, is something like "To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name"

Jonson was brilliant at punning etc - so what did he mean by that first line - "To DRAW no N V, Shakespeare, on thy name"? To NOT draw "NeVille" on Shakespeare's name? Why not? Because he was told not to. OF COURSE. Ben Jonson knew perfectly well who the real author was, and he was not the type to not try and tell us who the real author was, despite his instructions. Jonson and Neville drank together, and belonged to the same club. Both wrote plays and poetry. Jonson wrote a lovely poem to Neville, saying that he was as deep in (hidden) root as he was wide in breadth. Or something like that.

Henry Neville's own nickname was Falstaff - and he himself was fat! The first time Falstaff ever appeared in a play by Shakespeare he was called "Oldcastle", a pun on Ne Ville - New Town. Apparently the crowd booed the first time the character Oldcastle came on stage, because it was the name of a famous general they liked (? - not absolutely sure about this) - so after a couple of performances Shakespeare renamed the character Falstaff.

Anyway, you can gather from all this that I am absolutely certain that Brenda James has finally cracked the Shakespeare riddle. Neville spent nearly 3 years in the Tower of London with Southampton, to whom the sonnets are dedicated - Southampton is the Mr W.H. in the dedication - Mr Wriothesley Henry - you will find the word "reverse" in the first 12x12 grid! He is called Mr, because he lost the title of Earl when he was put in the Tower. You will also find RISELY in the transformed 12x12 grid - that is how Wriothesley is pronounced.

Somewhere Neville writes he has 11 brothers - even though he is not officially recorded as having any.

MY THEORY ...!!... is that Elizabeth was not a virgin - and had at least 8 children, among them Oxford, Bacon, Neville, Philip and Mary Sidney (I think their adoptive father was Elizabeth's half brother), Essex, Cecil junior, and Southampton. You will find an act of parliament passed when she was 50 saying that the issue of her body will be her heirs - not her legally born children! If you remember that was what caused Henry VIIIs troubles - he did have illegitimate children, but tried impossibly hard to get a legal son - even changing the religion in England to do so. Every other King in Europe had tons of illegitimate children - so why not Elizabeth? Elizabeth's very first letter to Cecil, when she is 13 or 14, asks him to squash the rumours going around that she is pregnant! Cecil placed the child with the Earl of Oxford, and personally adopted the boy when the Earl died. Somebody took out a court case, trying to claim a part of the Earl's Estate by saying that the Earl's son was not his real son - and Elizabeth herself paid for lawyers to defend the young earl - her first son. He went on to write some of "Shakespeare's" proto plays, which are lost. Edward, Earl of Oxford, and Sir Henry Neville, born about 15 years apart, both spent quite a bit of time in Venice. For a good chunk of each year they lived not far from each other in London. Both were interested in plays. Check out the Earl of Oxford's signature. He used to put 7 dots after his name - or crosses - I cannot remember. Anyway, he should have been King Edward 7th.

It is quite possible that Edward fathered Elizabeth's last child - Southampton ... when he was about 25. !! They disappeared together in a house near the river Thames for some months, for her confinement - and then Edward ran away to the continent, after "Southampton" was born.

No wonder they had to cover everything up !!!! England would have been the laughing stock of Europe. Plus, until 1923, inheritances could be undone - across generations, if something dodgy could be proved. These things had to be covered up generation after generation - or entire inheritances, of entire families, could have been lost. Is is said that Queen Victoria chucked written evidence onto a fire, that showed that Elizabeth married Leicester secretly in 1560. The evidence was produced by a Sidney descendant.

King Lear, written in 1604 when Neville had just got out of the Tower after Elizabeth died, is Queen Elizabeth, and the 3 daughters are 3 sons ... It is said that her last 3 years were miserable, and that she was half mad, and really miserable, when she died. Well, she had executed her favorite son, and put her other two favorites in the Tower, under sentence of death. The Tower of London is where Hamlet was written - "To be or not to be ...." It was real, not made up.

Have a look at the portrait of Southampton with his cat, made when he was in the Tower with Neville. Beautiful?

It goes on and on ..! Elizabethan history is a whole lot more interesting to me now! Everything fits, for the first time. All those loose ends, that made no sense. Why did Leicester adopt Essex? Well, he was his own son, by Elizabeth! Why did Elizabeth make Cecil a Baron the day before his daughter was married? Because his daughter was marrying Elizabeth's own first son. It is endless - I could go on for hours! The modern world was created by Elizabeth's bastards! They were all placed by Cecil, brilliantly educated, and given the European tour. Some of the plays are quite possibly a family effort! It is a BIG story! A Hollywood blockbuster - somebody will do it one day.

Look at the portraits of Elizabeth's children - they all have thin faces with curly orangery hair - like their parents! I believe that if both parents have red hair the children must all have red hair too. Is that right? Leicester was with Elizabeth for about 15 years. I think they found his last letter to her on the desk next to her bed when she died.

This rendering of Henry V is generally very well acted, with superb articulation by the actors. Compared to many film (and stage) versions of Shakespeare, where the actors seem to want to speak the lines as quickly as possible--seemingly because they feel that's how they should present emotion--and end up slurring the words together, the actors in this recording can communicate emotional range in a very articulate way, with excellent enunciation, well-placed pauses, and good modulation. The dialogue truly comes alive, and nuances unnoticed while reading come through clearly.

Another strong point is the evenness of the quality of the acting. All the characters, however minor or major, are played equally well, a sign of a well-directed play.

The music is at times a little sappy (for example during the St. Crispin Day's speech), but on the whole, if you want to really connect with spoken Shakespeare, it's hard to go wrong with this choice, either for teachers of Shakespeare or simple lovers of the bard.

William Shapkespeare's Henry V receives a gratifying full-cast narration and production which brings to life the underlying ironies and contrasts inherent in Shakespeare's play. The complete text here has been fully dramatized from the New Cambridge Shakespeare text and is truly outstanding.

The graphics and color bring the play alive and the three text versions provide an excellant transition for the age of your child. Why let the introduction to Shakespeare wait until a High School class when you can educate their young minds with his great work using this novel idea. Plus you can simple choose the text level to start them on; I choose the Quick text for my 10 year old.