Shakespeare Books

This is one of those series that is so well done you can't imagaine EVERYONE not knowing about it! Have you always been a bit out of the loop or intimidated about Shakespear? Or are you good with it but don't know how to show/share that love with your family and students. This series will do it!! It's good for ALL ages, my middle school students found it fun and informative yet... really young (4ish) children could learn from it too. Save your self the upgrade and buy it in hardback, this will be one that you keep for generations and get the "WHOLE" series, each one is just as good as the other!

Yet another excellent, ambitious work adapted from Shakespeare by the Shakespeare Restoration Project of the Klingon Language Institute. These guys have already done Hamlet and Gilgamesh, and they're working on the Bible and Macbeth.
Highly recommended for serious students of both Klingon language and William Shakespeare.

This is a favorite in our house! My daughter's preschool had this book. I finally remembered to buy it for her a year after she read it to me at her preschool. I love to feed the milk dish to the bunny, the chocolate cookie to the cat and the worm to the baby, etc. since it makes my daughter scream "NO!" and correct me! I especially like this book since the food is on color coded ribbons to assure proper food giving... in case that's what you want to do... and the ribbons also keep the food from getting lost. It's a board book, too, which is always nice for youngsters...

'don't want to give away anything from this theory that reads like a good mystery so i'll be brief:
i'm not a shakespeare expert but i found this book thrilling and convincing in the case and narrative it presents supporting a theory of "who shakespeare really was."
i am aware of the more widely accepted (and respected?) theory that shakespeare was the 17th earl of oxford.
nonetheless, mr hoffman gets my vote.

Northrop Frye is one of the greatest Shakespeare critics of all time (and there have been many). For those who think comedy is a trivial art form, this book will change your mind. Comedy is more serious than tragedy, and Frye illuminates not only Shakespeare's comedies but all comedy. He shows why Shakespeare's comedies are just as important, if not more important, than his tragedies because they pave the way for the romances which are the culmination of Shakespeare's work. The comedies and romances reveal the bounty and plentitude of life, and expose the basic illusions that keep a community from flourishing. They are a celebration of life. Any lover of Shakespeare will be in awe of Frye's admiration for the Bard and the joy he takes in writing about him. No reader can come away from this experience without a deeper appreciation of the greatest writer of all time.

I was lucky enough to find one in a used-book store. I treasure this one-volume behemoth!

Professor Nuttall enters the politically contested arena of mimesis studies and wins many points through intelligent and original thinking. Every post-modern critic should read this book. It may set a few of them straight.

If you are at all familiar with Shakespeare's plays, you MUST get this book. Even if you don't particularly care for his work. If you are a teenager being forced to read his work in school, you also should read this--it will not only help you understand the stuff, it will make you laugh your head off.

This is one of the most hilarious books I have ever read--and I'm used to reading the likes of everyone from Tom Robbins and Douglas Adams to Al Franken and Dennis Miller. As a kid, I found a copy of it in my hometown library and over the years would check it out over and over again...while employed at a bookstore I learned that the book was out of print and realized with horror that if anything happened to the one copy at my local branch, I could forget ever reading it again. So the book was copied (not by me, but I have access to it), because I couldn't stand the thought of it being lost. This is not to advocate piracy; this is to advocate the preservation of great works (humour or otherwise).

This book is essentially a summary of most of Shakespeare's most well-known plays (Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth), as well as some of the not-so-well known ones (All's Well That Ends Well, As You Like It, Measure For Measure). Sadly, not all are summarized, but I so wish that was the case. The writer was an English scholar who explained the plays in a dry, sarcastic, and thoroughly modern manner. If you want a good laugh, I strongly recommend you find this book by any means necessary.

"The night I thought I dropped Shakespeare on the cat I felt the reprieve of the man who accidentally goes through a red light without getting hit, the relief of the man who falls from a high cliff only to discover he's been dreaming. But the relief isn't immediate. It takes a little time. There are those few seconds in which the reality of the bed and sheets and room penetrate and so permeate the dream-ridden brain that the dream finally dissipates, melts back into the night from whence it came. There was no cliff, although the fiction of falling, the dream of falling was so real the brain believed all the whirling and twirling and limbs splaying and ground coming up were real. Meaning there is sometimes reality in irreality. Meaning a dream can be mud. Genuine as rain. The space in which I believed there to be a cat and there was no cat was that delicious space we call a fiction."

--John Olson

Olson is interested in words. He is interested in how sounds and images represent ideas and things. By the end of the book Olson is more comfortable being explicit with his relationship to language, but the first moment of epiphany--when it becomes evident that he is using the word "jackknife" repeatedly, simply because he likes the word "jackknife"--is the moment the book makes sense.

--Ellen Twadell, Raintaxi

Anthony Burgess had a marvelous agility with language and the words that comprise it. For "A Clockwork Orange," he invented an entire slang lingo, futuristic amalgam of Russian and English -- presupposing a melting-together of the two cultures as the result of some collision prior to the opening of the book. Miraculously, not far in, the reader starts to understand what Alex is saying and a bit further in, becomes able to start thinking in Alex's voice and vocabulary. A remarkable book. Now, about "Nothing Like the Sun." Burgess captures the Bard's voice by blending what is known about Elizabethan English and, of course, Shakespeare's own plays and poetry to create a narration that puts the reader right inside the man's head. Shakespeare scholars no doubt recoil at many of the details Burgess has provided to fit the subject into a novel. But for the non-Shakespeare-scholar, "Nothing Like The Sun" is a delightful, fanciful romp through the Bard's time, locale and personality.