Skillfully written and complemented with photos, this biography is the first to honor British actress-manager Lena Ashwell. In a rapidly changing world, Ashwell was crucial to the advancement of women in English theater and in the formation of the National Theater. The book highlights the inspiring woman’s other valuable accomplishments as well, including her efforts to raise money during World War I for thousands of concert-party troop entertainments and regular theater performances she established throughout local London communities. From her first appearance on stage in 1891 to the end of her life, this is Lena Ashwell’s story.
Aesop, or Æsop, known only for his fables, was by tradition a slave of African descent who lived from about 620 to 560 BC in Ancient Greece. Aesop's Fables are still taught as moral lessons and used as subjects for various entertainments, especially children's plays and cartoons.
This major new study of Elizabethan and Jacobean royal entertainments, including country house entertainments, tiltyard speeches, and court masques, is the first to look in detail at the evidence provided by the surviving material texts. Drafts, royal presentation manuscripts, widely-circulating scribal copies, and printed pamphlets are all carefully placed in their cultural context, and the medium of manuscript is shown to have been at least as important as print for these texts' circulation
humorous, and insightful, Readings is a collection of classic essays and reviews by Michael Dirda, book critic of the Washington Post and winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. From a first reading of Beckett and Faulkner at the feet of an inspirational high-school English teacher to a meeting of the P. G. Wodehouse Society, from an obsession with Nabokov's Lolita to the discovery of the Japanese epic The Tale of Genji, these essays chronicle a lifetime of literary enjoyment.
