William Shakespeare Books

It was very helpful and I felt much better reading the book with a translation. I really enjoyed Othello and I would reccomend it because of the translation of the Elisibethian speech to modern English.

My mom has a penchant for quoting Shakespeare authoritatively, however, inaccurately, so I bought her this book. She still quotes him, authoritatively, and inaccurately.

When searching for a child friendly book of stories based on William Shakespere's works I came across this little gem. The book is authored by Edith Nesbit, best known for her books "The Railway Children, Five Children and It and The Enchanted Castle." Edith has done a beautiful job of translating Shakespere's works into stories which will engage children in the classic works such as "A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet and King Lear." This is a delightful way to introduce your children to the world of William Shakespere.

Daniel Albright is an extraordinarily perceptive critical thinker. All of his studies are a delight to read, offering deep and thought-provoking insight into music, literature, and their intersections. His book on Berlioz's Romeo et Juliette and La Damnation de Faust, in two independant sections, is very well organized and allows the reader to understand a great deal about the works even if he or she is not intimately familiar with the texts or even with the music. He begins each section with a brief exegesis of the literary work (Shakespeare's or Goethe's), uses a few pages to explain Berlioz's exposure to the literature and possible inspirations for choosing to write semi-operas on the subjects, and then concludes with a hermeneutic approach to each semi-opera, relating it to other works in the composer's oevre and other various artistic entities.

The book is not difficult to read, but always use a dictionary when confronting Albright. He manages to find the most obscure but also the most perfect words for the context. I am consistently impressed by his vocabulary (highlights include "quaquaverse," "deliquescing," "conation," "palimpsest," and chiaroscuro!") His prose is beautifully constructed, and he manages the challenges of using a narrative structure to explain deep and broad subjects quite well.

Five stars!

This version includes:

The Tempest
Merry Wives of Windsor
Much Ado About Nothing
Midsummer Night's Dream
Merchant of Venice
As You Like It
Taming of the Shrew
Twelfth-Night:Or, What You Will
Life and Death of King Richard III
King Henry VIII
Romeo and Juliet
Julius Caesar
Macbeth
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
King Lear
Othello, The Moor of Venice
Antony and Cleopatra

Schoenfeldt masterfully combines a sophisticated literary analysis with the cultural prevalence of humoral medicine to provide real insight into the ways that people experienced and expressed their identities in early modern England. His book is well written, well considered, and should be well received. Hooray!

This book is based on the lecture notes taken by a Mr. Collier who attended the series of talks given by Coleridge in 1811-1812 at the London Philosophical Society .Coleridge was forty years of age at the time. The lectures open with a general one on the principles of poetry and are largely devoted to Shakespeare but there are a few on Milton.
Coleridge is one of English Literature's greatest Shakepeare critics. Coleridge was as a critic primarily interested in the creative process, and saw Shakespeare as the maker of great organic works, the Master of the Imagination ( and not of the mechanical Fancy). Coleridge's Hamlet criticism is one of the milestones in understanding the delay of Hamlet in executing his task. Above all this is a work of one great creative figure appreciating two other giants in the English Literary tradition.

Dr. Valerie Yule, a scholarly Australian authority on spelling. takes her expertise lightly. She has a mind loaded with information about present & past spelling of the English language, from text messaging all the way back, so the reader learns a lot. But beyond that, this book provides a unique view, accurate but mischievous. It is loaded with funny trivia about spelling. Those who speak or teach on educational subjects should keep it in their reference library as an unfailing supply of humorous remarks, limericks, anecdotes & snide observations, by past and present writers, about the way our language is written. Those who have enjoyed Eats, Shoots and Leaves, or Vivian Cook's Broccoli in the Cemetery, will also enjoy The Book of Spells and Misspells.

Of all the (countless) responses to the Bard by writers over the last four hundred years or so, this one may be the most idiosyncratic; it may also be the most intelligent, insightful and inspired. BOTTOM: ON SHAKESPEARE reminds me a little bit of Burton's THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY, first, in its encyclopedic bulk, and, second, in the preponderance of quotes in its pages. Louis Zukofsky was a world-class quoter (he's spiritual kin to Walter Benjamin, I think, who dreamed of writing-if that's the right word-a book composed entirely of quotations), and in BOTTOM, he cites everyone from Homer to Wittgenstein, and whole pages of Shakespeare, for the central purpose of elucidating what may be thought of as the book's thesis, which Zukofsky puts thus:

"Love is to reason as the eyes are to mind."

I don't pretend to understand entirely what that means. But the idea that to perceive something as it truly is requires love, or is the beginning of love, or both, is beautiful.

It's important to keep in mind that although he was a professor of English, widely read, and had an acute literary-critical gift, Zukofsky was, above all, an artist. A staggering amount of scholarship went into BOTTOM, but it is, in the end, a poetic response to Shakespeare, a poet's reply to a poet. By academic standards, therefore, BOTTOM is downright eccentric. An example. Elsewhere, Zukofsky writes, "And it is possible in imagination to divorce speech of all graphic elements, to let it become a movement of sounds." Thought as music. A writer as deeply ethical as Zukofsky would never say something like that if he didn't mean it, and so we find that the second part of BOTTOM, the culmination of his thought on Shakespeare, isn't critical prose, but a musical setting for PERICLES, composed by Celia Zukofsky, Louis's wife.

Obviously, this book isn't an introduction to Shakespeare. The student coming to grips with the Bard won't get much help here. Like Zukofsky's poetry, of which it's very much an extension, BOTTOM can be obscure and taxing. On the other hand, it's as beautiful as it is difficult. At every turn, some idea or turn of phrase will make the patient reader gasp (or sigh, I suppose, depending on one's temperament). For anyone really, vitally engaged with Shakespeare, for any fan of Zukofsky, and for anyone who really cares about poetry, five stars is too few to recommend BOTTOM: ON SHAKESPEARE.

You'll never again experience Shakespeare without noticing a little Butter in the Bard, as this book exclusively and exhaustively spotlights for the first time in over four centuries ALL references to food, drink, drinking, cooking, eating, feasting and culinary activity found in the ENTIRE works of William Shakespeare. Includes: unparaleled tally of vivand in verse surpassing 10,000; seventeen Chefspearean Classifications showcasing (verbatim) the culinary commentaries of Romeo, Cleopatra, Hamlet, Caesar, Macbeth, Othello, Falstaff, et. al., from the COMPLETE thirty-seven plays. Discover how The Shakespeare Vivands (articles of food) create the visionary basis for the FIRST Pan-Cultural Cuisine in the world! Learn about the "missing" Shakesperean breakfast; The Shakespearean Loop-Holes; Guidelines for Chefspearean Cooking; The Chefspeare Society, global brotherhood and more! This superbly stylized expose offers so rare, fresh and unique a perspective on Shakepeare AND food, that we thrice guarantee you'll never even experience the culinary art again, without noticing a little Bard...in the butter! -- from book's back cover