The Annotated Shakespeare
Perhaps no other Shakespearean drama so engulfs its readers in the ruinous journey of surrender to evil as does Macbeth. A timeless tragedy about the nature of ambition, conscience, and the human heart, the play holds a profound grip on the Western imagination.
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is perhaps the most read and beloved of all stage works. Now the most extensively annotated version of the play to date makes it completely accessible to readers in the twenty-first century. The new edition is a rich resource for students, teachers, and the general reader.
Eminent linguist and translator Burton Raffel offers generous help with vocabulary and usage of Elizabethan English, pronunciation, prosody, and alternative readings of phrases and lines. His on-page annotations provide readers with the tools they need to comprehend the play and begin to explore its many possible interpretations. This version of Romeo and Juliet is unparalleled for its thoroughness and adherence to sound linguistic principles.
In his introduction, Raffel provides historical and social contexts that increase the reader’s understanding of the play. And in a concluding essay, Harold Bloom argues that Romeo and Juliet is unmatched in the world’s literature as a vision of an uncompromising love that perishes of its own idealism and intensity.”
Treacherous, power-hungry, untempered by moral restraint, and embittered by physical deformity, Richard, the younger brother of King Edward IV, is ablaze with ambition to take England’s throne. Richard III, Shakespeare’s long chronicle of Richard’s machinations to be king, is a tale of murder upon murder. He gains the throne, but only briefly. In a terrible dream, the ghosts of his victims visit the now-despised monarch to foretell his demise. Richard's death in battle the next day concludes his reign of evil, ushering in at last a new and hopeful era of peace for England.
