Showing titles in Shakespeare

By the time Shakespeare came to write Macbeth - almost certainly in 1605/1606 - he had already completed three of the great tragedies with which modern audiences are so familiar: Hamlet (1601), Othello (1603), and King Lear (1605). Each of those plays gives us an eponymous hero who is in some significant way flawed, but for whom we also inevitably feel deep sympathy, whatever his errors or crimes. But in MacBeth, Shakespeare has chosen for his tragic hero a man guilty of the most terrible crime imaginable to a Jacobean audience, that of regicide - the murder of a king.

Twelfth Night, nowadays one of Shakespeare's best-loved and most-admired comedies, was not always so regarded: Samuel Pepys saw the play three times in the 1660s and judged it 'silly'. Modern audiences, critics, and directors seem better attuned to its delicate counter pointing of romance and realism....

David Ian Davies performs this unique and exciting reading of William Shakespeare's erotic poem, The Rape of Lucrece - not available on cassette or CD!

Henry V, which dates from 1599, is the last in Shakespeare's series of plays based on English history. It is also, of course, among the Bard's best-known and most-performed works. It's given rich new life here by a full-cast presentation that combines classic literature with classical music.

Graeme Malcolm, Eric Stoltz, and other accomplished actors bring life to the words of the world's favorite poets, including William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Also available: The Best Poems of All Time, Volume 2.

This production of Hamlet, directed by Sir John Gielgud and starring Richard Burton, was recorded in the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, and with the actors performing just as they would if you went to see a production tonight. "The particular intensity and nerves of this is probably the same kind of thing that excites an audience in live theater," says Richard Burton.

Here is the full-cast production of Shakespeare's classic love story, fully dramatized from the complete text, and starring Michael Sheen as Romeo and Kate Beckinsale as Juliet.

The skies over ancient Rome blaze with terrifying portents, and soothsayers warn Julius Caesar of approaching doom. As conspiracy swirls through the city, Shakespeare explores the deep repercussions of political murder on the human heart. A classic tale of duplicity, betrayal and murder, masterfully performed by an all-star, all-American cast in this BBC co-production.

Macbeth is among the most powerful of Shakespeare's tragedies, a dark but fascinating glimpse into the soul of evil. Set in medieval Scotland in an atmosphere of civil unrest and mutual suspicion, Macbeth probes the intellectual, as well as the emotional consequences of unbridled ambition and the cold-blooded murder it engenders.

In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare created one of the greatest verbal sparring matches in all of literature, echoes of which can be heard in the sophisticated dialogue of such late masters as George Bernard Shaw and Noel Coward. Throughout the play, would-be lovers Beatrice and Benedick circle each other warily, until their scathing witticisms and sly innuendoes reach a feverish intensity that befits the passionate longing they both vainly seek to deny.

The Tempest was the last of Shakespeare's comedies, completed just before he retired to his native Stratford-upon-Avon; perhaps this delightful comedy was intended to signal the playwright's farewell to his beloved theater. The Tempest reflects Shakespeare's mature genius, with its story of innocence tempered by intrigue, hilarity bounded by melancholy. Audiences the world over still thrill to see The Tempest's dark comedy and magical fantasy.

There is no finer way to welcome young people (or adults!) to the pleasures of Shakespeare than with these four masterful retellings of the Bard's most beloved plays. Ranging from the pure magic of A Midsummer Night's Dream to the heartbreak of young love in Romeo and Juliet, featuring the spine-tingling tragedy of Macbeth (complete with ghost and witches) and culminating in the laugh-out-loud hijinks of Twelfth Night.

Now, for the first time in audio, Blackstone presents seven great plays in one volume: Euripides' Medea, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Moliere's The Imaginary Invalid, Dumas' Camille, Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, Shaw's Arms and the Man, and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. These productions illustrate the development of European drama from ancient times to the threshold of the modern theater.

Romeo and Juliet was Shakespeare's first great tragedy, a richly lyrical love story that has long been one of the author's most popular plays for performer and audience alike. Romeo and Juliet is a simple but dramatic cautionary tale about the blindness that both love and hate can engender. As performed by Claire Bloom and Albert Finney, this lively production captures the youthful exuberance and poetic passion that characterize all of Shakespeare's early work.

I am a man more sinned against than sinning.

The Comedy of Errors is likely the very first play Shakespeare ever wrote, and for that reason alone it deserves a special place in literary history. Yet, despite the author's lack of maturity, the play is unmistakably the work of a burgeoning master. A farce of a type that was wildly popular in Shakespeare's day, The Comedy of Errors transcends its genre, and is as accessible and as entertaining as any of the Bard's later comedies.

He after honor hunts, I after love. He leaves his friends to dignify them more, I leave myself, my friends and all, for love....

Kiss me, Kate, we will be married o'Sunday

The complete play in five acts.

The complete play in five acts.