Antony and Cleopatra - William Shakespeare (with notes and glossary)
The most formally ambitious and poetically brilliant of Shakespeare's tragedies, Anthony and Cleopatra is also one of his most critically contentious plays in terms of the degree and nature of its success. Antony and Cleopatra is based on the intertwined lives of Roman general Mark Antony and Cleopatra, queen of Egypt from 51 to 30 bc. For his account of the characters and times, Shakespeare used Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Greek biographer Plutarch's Parallel Lives.
Shakespeare and Biography is not a new biography of Shakespeare. Instead, it is a study of what biographers have said about Shakespeare, from the first formal biography in the early 18th century by Nicholas Rowe to Stephen Greenblatt, James Shapiro, Jonathan Bate, Germaine Greer, Katherine Duncan-Jones, Park Honan, Rene Weis, and others who have written recent biographical accounts of England's greatest writer. The emphasis is on what sorts of issues these biographers have found especially interesting in relation to sex and gender, politics, religion, pessimism, misanthropy, jealousy, aging, family relationships, the end of a career, the end of life.
The Comedy of Errors - William Shakespeare (with notes and glossary)
The Comedy of Errors is one of William Shakespeare's early plays. It is his shortest and one of his most farcical comedies, with a major part of the humour coming from slapstick and mistaken identity, in addition to puns and word play.
Sparkling with the witty dialogue between Beatrice and Benedicts, Much Ado About Nothing is one of Shakespeare's most enjoyable and theatrically successful comedies.
