Includes: freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play; full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play; scene-by-scene plot summaries; a key to famous lines and phrases; an introduction to reading Shakespeare's language; an essay by an outstanding scholar providing a modern perspective on the play; and illustrations from the Folger Shakespeare Library's vast holdings of rare books.

"Fascinating, pleasantly illustrated, simple and easy-to-read, these Shakespeare stories for children will make your kids love the magical world of literature."

Love's Labours Lost - William Shakespeare - Love's Labour's Lost is one of William Shakespeare's early comedies, believed to have been written in the mid-1590s for a performance at the Inns of Court before Queen Elizabeth I. It follows the King of Navarre and his three companions as they attempt to forswear the company of women for three years of study and fasting, and their subsequent infatuation with the Princess of Aquitaine and her ladies. In...

No more "Double, double, toil and trouble?"

Now you can learn Shakespeare on the double!

Macbeth has all the ingredients of a modern day bestseller-greed, ambition, murder, mayhem, madness, politics, assassinations, hallucinations, prophecies, spells, and rebellion. Potions and emotions simmer. One betrayal leads to another. Now you can sit back and read Macbeth like the thriller it is! This modern, easy-to-understand

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Shakespeare's play depicting the waning years of both a king and a thief-and a young heir's changing relationship with each of them. Prince Hal has proven his worth on the battlefield, but even as the elder Henry's condition grows weaker, Hal's ability to follow in his father's footsteps may be in doubt. His longtime friendship with the drunken, thieving, yet thoroughly alluring Falstaff, and the influence of their rowdy tavern companions, are tempting...

This complete, line-by-line Macbeth translation makes the language of Shakespeare's play more modern while preserving the metrical rhythm, complexity, and poetic qualities of the original. The aim is to capture the sound and sense of Shakespeare's tragedy without the need for glosses or notes--to use contemporary language without simplifying or modernizing the play in any other way.

Presents the original text of Shakespeare's play side by side with a modern version, discusses the author and the theater of his time, and provides quizzes and other study activities.

Shakespeare's Richard II presents a momentous struggle between Richard II and his cousin Henry Bolingbroke. Richard is the legitimate king; he succeeded his grandfather, King Edward III, after the earlier death of his father Edward, the Black Prince. Yet Richard is also seen by many as a tyrant. He toys with his subjects, exiling Bolingbroke for six years. When he seizes the title and property that should be Bolingbroke's, Richard threatens the very...

Henry V potrays a high, and perhaps unique, moment in English national history, when it represents a country both internally unified and internationally victorious, one that has briefly exchanged civil unrest for foreign triumph. It is the ninth and final play on English history Shakespeare wrote in the 1950's.