Shakespeare in London

The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

• UNABRIDGED (11 hrs and 6 mins)
• By James Shapiro
• Narrated By Robert Fass
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

In the years leading up to 1606, since the death of Queen Elizabeth and the arrival in England of her successor, King James of Scotland, Shakespeare's great productivity had ebbed, and it may have seemed to some that his prolific genius was a thing of the past. But that year, at age 42, he found his footing again, finishing a play he had begun the previous autumn - King Lear - then writing two other great tragedies, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.

Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe

• UNABRIDGED (20 hrs and 3 mins)
• By Andrew Dickson
• Narrated By Andrew Dickson
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

There are 83 copies of the First Folio in a vault beneath Capitol Hill - the world's largest collection. Well over 150 Indian movies are based on Shakespeare's plays - more than in any other nation. If current trends continue, there will soon be more high school students reading The Merchant of Venice in Mandarin Chinese than in early modern English. Why did this happen, and how? Ranging ambitiously across four continents and 400 years, Worlds Elsewhere is an eye-opening account of how Shakespeare went global.

How to Be a Tudor: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Tudor Life

• UNABRIDGED (10 hrs and 22 mins)
• By Ruth Goodman
• Narrated By Heather Wilds
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

On the heels of her triumphant How to Be a Victorian, Ruth Goodman travels even further back in English history to the era closest to her heart, the dramatic period from the crowning of Henry VII to the death of Elizabeth I. Drawing on her own adventures living in re-created Tudor conditions, Goodman serves as our intrepid guide to 16th-century living. Proceeding from daybreak to bedtime, this charming, illustrative work celebrates the ordinary lives of those who labored through the era.

Shakespeare's Original Pronunciation: Speeches and Scenes Performed as Shakespeare Would Have Heard Them

• ORIGINAL (1 hr and 15 mins)
• By William Shakespeare
• Narrated By Ben Crystal, Philip Bird, Rebecca Pownell, and others

How did Shakespeare sound to the audiences of his day? For the first time, this audio offers listeners the chance to hear England's greatest playwright performed by a company of actors using the pronunciation of his time. Under the guidance of Ben Crystal, actor, author of Shakespeare on Toast, and an expert in original Shakespearian pronunciation, the company performs some of Shakespeare's best-known poems, solo speeches, and scenes from the plays.

Shakespeare: The Biography

• UNABRIDGED (19 hrs and 12 mins)
• By Peter Ackroyd
• Narrated By Simon Vance
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

In a magnificent feat of re-creating sixteenth-century London and Stratford, best-selling biographer and novelist Peter Ackroyd brings William Shakespeare to life in the manner of a contemporary rather than a biographer. Following his magisterial and ingenious re-creations of the lives of Chaucer, Dickens, T. S. Eliot, William Blake, and Sir Thomas More, Ackroyd delivers his crowning achievement with this definitive and imaginative biographical masterpiece.

The Private Lives of the Tudors: Uncovering the Secrets of Britain's Greatest Dynasty

• UNABRIDGED (15 hrs and 17 mins)
• By Tracy Borman
• Narrated By Jonathan Keeble, Sandra Duncan

The Tudor monarchs were constantly surrounded by an army of attendants, courtiers and ministers. Even in their most private moments, they were accompanied by a servant specifically appointed for the task. A groom of the stool would stand patiently by as Henry VIII performed his daily purges, and when Elizabeth I retired for the evening, one of her female servants would sleep at the end of her bed. These attendants knew the truth behind the glamorous exterior.

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

• UNABRIDGED (15 hrs and 16 mins)
• By Stephen Greenblatt
• Narrated By Peter Jay Fernandez

Award-winning author Stephen Greenblatt is one of the most influential literary thinkers in the world. An acclaimed interpreter of Shakespeare's works, his ideas have changed the way countless people approach the classics. Now Greenblatt's uniquely brilliant voice delivers a magnificent biography of the Bard himself.

Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution

• UNABRIDGED (13 hrs and 19 mins)
• By Nathaniel Philbrick
• Narrated By Scott Brick
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

In September 1776 the vulnerable Continental Army, under an unsure George Washington (who had never commanded a large force in battle), evacuates New York after a devastating defeat by the British army. Three weeks later, near the Canadian border, one of his favorite generals, Benedict Arnold, miraculously succeeds in postponing the British naval advance down Lake Champlain that might have ended the war.

Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors: The History of England, Book 1

• UNABRIDGED (18 hrs and 22 mins)
• By Peter Ackroyd
• Narrated By Clive Chafer

In Foundation the chronicler of London and of its river, the Thames, takes us from the primeval forests of England's prehistory to the death of the first Tudor king, Henry VII, in 1509. He guides us from the building of Stonehenge to the founding of the two great glories of medieval England: common law and the cathedrals. He shows us glimpses of the country's most distant past - a Neolithic stirrup found in a grave, a Roman fort, a Saxon tomb, a medieval manor house.

The Medici: Power, Money, and Ambition in the Italian Renaissance

• UNABRIDGED (16 hrs and 21 mins)
• By Paul Strathern
• Narrated By Derek Perkins
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Against the background of an age that saw the rebirth of ancient and classical learning, Paul Strathern explores the intensely dramatic rise and fall of the Medici family in Florence as well as the Italian Renaissance, which they did so much to sponsor and encourage. Interwoven into the narrative are the lives of many of the great Renaissance artists with whom the Medici had dealings, including Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Donatello as well as scientists like Galileo and Pico della Mirandola.

A Doll House

• ORIGINAL (2 hrs and 10 mins)
• By Henrik Ibsen
• Narrated By Calista Flockhart, Tony Abatemarco, Tim Dekay, and others

A new recording of Henrik Ibsen's masterpiece, starring Calista Flockhart. Nora Helmer has everything a young housewife could want: beautiful children, an adoring husband, and a bright future. But when a carelessly buried secret rises from the past, Nora's well-calibrated domestic ideal starts to crumble. Ibsen's play is as fresh today as it was when it first stormed the stages of 19th-century Europe.

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

• UNABRIDGED (18 hrs and 30 mins)
• By Mary Beard
• Narrated By Phyllida Nash

In SPQR, world-renowned classicist Mary Beard narrates the unprecedented rise of a civilization that even 2,000 years later still shapes many of our most fundamental assumptions about power, citizenship, responsibility, political violence, empire, luxury, and beauty.

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

• UNABRIDGED (9 hrs and 44 mins)
• By Stephen Greenblatt
• Narrated By Edoardo Ballerini
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late 30s took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic by Lucretius—a beautiful poem containing the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles.

The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th Century Bookseller's Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece

• UNABRIDGED (10 hrs and 15 mins)
• By Laura Cumming
• Narrated By Siobhan Redmond
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

When John Snare, a 19th-century provincial bookseller, traveled to a liquidation auction, he stumbled on a vivid portrait of King Charles I that defied any explanation. The Charles of the painting was young - too young to be king - and yet also too young to be painted by the Flemish painter to which the work was attributed. Snare had found something incredible - but what? His research brought him to Diego Velázquez, whose long-lost portrait of Prince Charles has eluded art experts for generations.

The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind

• UNABRIDGED (14 hrs and 42 mins)
• By A. C. Grayling
• Narrated By Ric Jerrom
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

The Age of Genius explores the eventful intertwining of outward event and inner intellectual life to tell, in all its richness and depth, the story of the 17th century in Europe. It was a time of creativity unparalleled in history before or since, from science to the arts, from philosophy to politics. Acclaimed philosopher and historian A. C. Grayling points to three primary factors that led to the rise of vernacular (popular) languages in philosophy, theology, science, and literature.

Balancing Acts: Behind the Scenes at the National Theatre

• UNABRIDGED (11 hrs and 6 mins)
• By Nicholas Hytner
• Narrated By Nicholas Hytner, Simon Russell Beale, Samuel Barnett, and others

You start with a vision, and you deliver a compromise. You want a play to be challenging, ambitious, nuanced and complicated. You also want it to sell tickets. You want to make art, and you know you're in show business. These are some of the balancing acts that the National Theatre and this book are about. This is the inside story of 12 years at the helm of Britain's greatest theatre. It is a story of lunatic failures and spectacular successes.

Richard Nixon: The Life

• UNABRIDGED (28 hrs and 37 mins)
• By John A. Farrell
• Narrated By Dan Woren
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Richard Nixon opens with young navy lieutenant "Nick" Nixon returning from the Pacific and setting his cap at Congress, an idealistic dreamer seeking to build a better world. Yet amid the turns of that now legendary 1946 campaign, Nixon's finer attributes quickly gave way to unapologetic ruthlessness. It is a stunning overture to John A. Farrell's magisterial portrait of a man who embodied postwar American cynicism.

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

• UNABRIDGED (1 hr and 45 mins)
• By Carlo Rovelli
• Narrated By Carlo Rovelli

In seven brief lessons, Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli guides listeners with admirable clarity through the most transformative physics breakthroughs of the 20th and 21st centuries. This playful, entertaining, and mind-bending introduction to modern physics, already a major best seller in Italy, explains general relativity, quantum mechanics, elementary particles, gravity, black holes, the complex architecture of the universe, and the role of humans in the strange world Rovelli describes.

The Oscar Wilde Collection

• ORIGINAL (8 hrs and 22 mins)
• By Oscar Wilde
• Narrated By James Marsters, Jacqueline Bisset, Alfred Molina, and others

Four classic comedies from one of the wittiest playwrights in Western literature: Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest, all featuring star-studded casts with the likes of Jacqueline Bisset, Miriam Margolyes, James Marsters, Alfred Molina, Roger Rees, Yeardley Smith, Eric Stoltz, and many more. This audio also includes a chilling dramatization of Wilde's sole novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Vivat Rex: Volume 2: Landmark drama from the BBC Radio Archive

• ORIGINAL (12 hrs and 35 mins)
• By William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and others
• Narrated By full cast, Richard Burton

Richard Burton narrates the second volume of this famous dramatic chronicle of the English Crown, a treasure of the BBC radio archive published in audiobook for the very first time. Vivat Rex is the landmark drama series first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1977. Over the course of 26 installments, each one narrated by Richard Burton with a full cast, the fortunes of the English Crown are followed through 225 years of British history, from Edward II’s accession in 1307 to the birth of Elizabeth I.

A Midsummer Night's Dream: Fully Dramatized Audio Edition

• ORIGINAL (2 hrs and 7 mins)
• By William Shakespeare
• Narrated By full cast

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare stages the workings of love in unexpected ways. In the woods outside Athens, two young men and two young women sort themselves into couples - but not before they form first one love triangle, and then another. The king and queen of fairyland, Oberon and Titania, battle over custody of an orphan boy. Oberon uses magic to make Titania fall in love with a weaver named Bottom, in an effort to distract Titania from the custody battle.

The Life and Writings of C. S. Lewis

• ORIGINAL (6 hrs and 5 mins)
• By The Great Courses
• Narrated By Professor Louis Markos

What can we still learn from C.S. Lewis? Find out in these 12 insightful lectures that cover the author's spiritual autobiography, novels, and his scholarly writings that reflect on pain and grief, love and friendship, prophecy and miracles, and education and mythology.

Julius Caesar: The Arkangel Shakespeare

• ORIGINAL (2 hrs and 26 mins)
• By William Shakespeare
• Narrated By Michael Feast, John Bowe, Adrian Lester

At the heart of this tragic history is one of Shakespeare's most noble characters, the statesman Brutus, who is caught in a devastating conflict between private affection and public duty.

Julius Caesar has become the most powerful man in the Rome. Does his power now threaten the very existence of the Republic itself? A conspiracy is hatched, one that will have fatal consequences not only for Caesar and the conspirators but for the future history of the ancient world.

The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England

• UNABRIDGED (17 hrs and 44 mins)
• By Ian Mortimer
• Narrated By Mike Grady

Organized as a travel guide for the time-hopping tourist, The Time-Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England is an entertaining popular history with a twist. Historian Ian Mortimer reveals in delightful (and occasionally disturbing) detail how the streets and homes of 16th century looked, sounded, and smelled for both peasants and for royals; what people wore and ate; how they were punished for crimes and treated for diseases; and the complex and contradictory Elizabethan attitudes toward violence, class, sex, and religion.