When the adventurer Walter Ralegh first encountered Elizabeth I he supposedly placed his cloak over a puddle and allowed the queen to walk across it. Thus began one of the most intriguing relationships between a monarch and her favourite. The Favourite explores the labyrinthine complexity of human emotion, ambition and ritual within the restricted confines of the Tudor court. Was the favourite a Machiavellian schemer who fooled the queen in her affections? Was Elizabeth willing to manipulate her courtier for her own ends? The Queen’s affection for Ralegh would protect him but he would soon become the ‘most hated man in England’.
The Tempest has long dazzled readers and audiences with its intricate blend of magic, music, humour, intrigue and tenderness, its vibrant but ambiguous central characters. As Virginia and Alden Vaughan show, in their wide-ranging new edition of this established favourite, such antithetical extremes exemplify the play’s endlessly arguable nature, its appeal to diverse eras and cultures.
This book is an attempt to provide all the information anybody could need to determine what it means to be a resident of Australia, what our national values might be and whether there is an average way of living here. You can tell a lot about a nation by the way it shops, talks, eats, laughs and entertains itself. That's the kind of detail you'll find in this book - our favourite movies, our political passions, our most popular products, our world records, our changing language... (the author)
