Shakespeare Books

I really enjopyed the simple activities in this book and the free poster was a great tool as well. My only beef with the book is that I was mislead alittle on the grade level, this book is definately for fourth through eighth grade.

This book reveals a lot about the controversies surrounding Shakespeare's play, The Tempest. The authors discuss the various ways in which the play is interpreted and how to teach it in the context of these different views. In this case study, two main views are presented. One is traditional and timeless, while the other is more radical and contemporary. The traditional scholars want to believe that The Tempest is simply about art and culture triumphing over brute nature, while the more liberal ones want to believe that it is an attack on colonialism. While the authors of this book certainly seem more sympathetic to the latter, its aim is not to say who is wrong or right. Rather, the aim of the book is to stress the importance of connecting literature to life. Students must be aware that the play is about more than Prospero and the island. From the traditionalist point of view, the play is a celebration of human civilization and art. It is also about love and forgiveness triumphing over bitterness and hatred. According to the more liberal scholars however, the play has an underlying meaning that Shakespeare himself may not have even been aware of. For these people, Caliban represents the native American peoples while Prospero represents the Europeans. These readers are more sympathetic to Caliban because they believe his land was wrongfully taken from him. Even though Prospero wins in the end, we are suppose to question whether it is right. Shakespeare wrote this play right around the time that people were colonizing the new world, and many of his contemporaries struggled with the morality of that. Perhaps this play presents some of Shakespeare's own misgivings about it. This book brings us to the conclusion that however we interpret the play, it is important to connect the text to these different life aspects to better understand it.

This was a great helper for my english class. It helped so mcuh for studing and homework. In it you get not only the text, but summaries and translations from the old english to the modern english. It also includes insights into William Shakspears writting technique. It helped me so much i dont know what i'd do without it. I recommend this to anyone who is studing The Tempest, because it will be your bestfriend forever! Definatly choose this edition! It's FANTASTIC!

The Oxford School Shakespeare series is excellent for students, both high schoolers and undergraduates. They provide play text that is clearly and attractively laid out on the page with copious notes and annotations, as well as line-drawings and illustrations to enliven and elucidate. The introductory material on sources, plot summary, characterizations, thematic interpretations, music, and even suggestions for classwork and projects for expanded study, are excellent. Highly recommended!

What a great way to introduce children to classic literature and universal themes! My 1st-3rd graders are entranced by The Tempest. They love the way it rhymes and the complicated plot. They have seen parallels between this story and The Hobbit. Immediately, they compared Caliban to Gollum and remembered how Gandalf threw his voice to cause the fight among the trolls much the same way Ariel did. I really recommend this series to teachers and parents alike. The Tempest in particular is great if you are studying Jamestown as it is believed that Shakespeare was inspired by newspaper accounts of a ship (bound for Jamestown) that got lost at sea due to a great storm. It landed on a tropical island where the crew and passengers were stranded for a few months. I most definitely will buy more books from this series (or my students might revolt).

Tempest in the Caribbean would amount to a tour de force if it had been written by a lifelong scholar of Caribbean literature. Given that most of Jonathan Goldberg's previous work is on the English Renaissance, it's both a tour de force and a wonder. Placing issues of sexuality at the center of his readings without displacing the centrality of race, gender, and colonialism, Goldberg offers exact and startling articulations that I hope will inspire many further projects.

This works very well for children while still keeping the lyricism of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" as well as makes sense. (Many adaptations, even for adults, are edited in strange places that end up making his works even more confusing than they already can be.) Recommended.

Hawkes' piece of literary metacriticism trumps the work of the critic by suggesting that adopting a singular view about a text is not only futile, but worthless. Dizzily dipping between Shakespearean texts and the American jazz tradition, Hawkes proposes new possibilities for criticism that may free us yet of our anxieties as critics. Or maybe it's just a delightful daydream.

Girar is a quite heterodox critic, and his trademark, mimetic desire (that is the fact that we desire something by imitating someone else who also desire it either directly (our best friend's girlfriend) or indirectly (social stereotypes that make desirable a certain type of woman or a specific product), provides a unique reading of the work of the bard. The book is based on the thesis that Shakespeare had conciousness of mimetic desire and that his plays show a representation of it as part of their plot. Girard focuses on many plays and on the sonnets and his reading is fascinating. Probably some will find his analysis repetitiva and determinist. However, the fact that mimetic desire is quite unlike any other theory applied to the bard creates very interesting readings of character development and plot in the plays, as well as one of the most convincing theories on the sonnets I have ever read. When combined with Bloom's Shakespeare and Greenblatt's Shakespearean Negotiations, the reading of Shakespeare becomes an excellent exercise of literary pleasure and a stimulating intellectual experience.