A TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BEST BOOK OF THE YEARDrawing on an exceptional combination of skills as literary biographer, novelist, and chronicler of London history, Peter Ackroyd surely re-creates the world that shaped Shakespeare--and brings the...

" I have been led into an exploration of the way the social form of Elizabethan holidays contributed to the dramatic form of festive comedy. To relate this drama to holiday has proved to be the most effective way to describe its character. And this...

The acclaimed Pelican Shakespeare series, now in a dazzling new series designWinner of the 2016 AIGA + Design Observer 50 Books | 50 Covers competitionGold Medal Winner of the 3x3 Illustration Annual No. 14This edition of Romeo and Juliet is edited with...

This is the first full-length survey of one of the leading playwrights of the postwar generation. Through his career as playwright, filmmaker, and director, David Hare has been at the forefront of modern theater and his work is frequently seen as a...

Bill Bryson’s bestselling biography of William Shakespeare takes the reader on an enthralling tour through Elizabethan England and the eccentricities of Shakespearean scholarship—updated with a new introduction by the author to commemorate the 400th...

First published in 1996, James Shapiro's pathbreaking analysis of the portrayal of Jews in Elizabethan England challenged readers to recognize the significance of Jewish questions in Shakespeare's day. From accounts of Christians masquerading as Jews to...

The acclaimed Pelican Shakespeare series, now in a dazzling new series designWinner of the 2016 AIGA + Design Observer 50 Books | 50 Covers competitionGold Medal Winner of the 3x3 Illustration Annual No. 14This edition of Macbeth is edited with an...

Many colorful theatrical activities can be found throughout China. The best known and most unique of these is perhaps traditional Chinese opera, which has a history of over 800 years. However, since the early twentieth century, following increased...

A backstage pass to the groundbreaking, hit musical Hamilton, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Eleven Tony Awards, including Best Musical, including the award-winning libretto, behind-the-scenes photos and interviews, and exclusive...

THE SIGNET CLASSIC SHAKESPEARE SERIESThe Work of the World’s Greatest DramatistA great way to enjoy twenty of Shakespeare’s timeless plays, this volume is a retelling of the stories in prose by the famous nineteenth-century brother and sister Charles and...

Plautus wrote upwards of fifty plays, of which twenty have survived. This anthology includes his best plays and also seeks to give some idea of his range. His forte was farce, and these selections exemplify at least two of his favorite farcical devices:...

Women of Will is a fierce and funny exploration of Shakespeare’s understanding of the feminine. Tina Packer, one of our foremost Shakespeare experts, shows that Shakespeare began, in his early comedies, by writing women as shrews to be tamed or as sweet...

The authoritative edition of King Lear from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers.Shakespeare’s King Lear challenges us with the magnitude, intensity, and sheer duration of the...

To celebrate the centennial of his birth, the collected plays of America’s greatest twentieth-century dramatist in a Penguin Classics Deluxe EditionIn the history of postwar American art and politics, Arthur Miller casts a long shadow as a playwright of...

The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, reissued with a new afterword for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the...

In this moving exploration of parenthood, an American mother and a Tibetan father have a three-year-old son believed to be the reincarnation of a Buddhist lama. When a Tibetan lama and a monk come to their home unexpectedly, asking to take their child...

When Falstaff calls upon the sky to rain potatoes in The Merry Wives of Windsor, he highlights the belief that the exotic vegetable, recently introduced to England from the Americas, was an aphrodisiac. In Romeo and Juliet, Lady Capulet calls for quinces...

Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725) wrote some 130 plays, chiefly for the puppet theater, many of which are still performed today by puppet operators and Kabuki actors. Chikamatsu is thought to have written the first major tragedies about the common man...

Richard Greenberg is the winner of the Newsday's George Oppenheimer Award for Best New American Playwright, the Molly Kazan Playwriting Award, the Pen/Laura Pels Award, and his play Three Days of Rain was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize. He has been...

Far more than any professional historian, Shakespeare is responsible for whatever notions most of us possess about English medieval history. Anyone who appreciates the dramatic action of Shakespeare's history plays but is confused by much of the...