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Valentine and Proteus are devoted comrades ― until they travel to Milan and meet Silvia, the Duke's ravishing daughter. Torn between the bonds of friendship and the lure of romance, the two gentlemen are further bedeviled by Proteus's prior commitment to Julia, his hometown sweetheart, and the Duke's disdain for Valentine. Thus the stage is set for a comic spree involving a daring escape into a forest, capture by outlaws, and the antics of a clown...
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The charms of the poems in A Shropshire Lad, published in 1896, continue to resonate today. Housman's first collection and his signature work, the poems here mix the styles of traditional English ballads and classical verse, and evoke the idyllic English countryside, explore the nature of friendship, bravery, and the passing of youth, among other themes.
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Relatively unknown in his own lifetime, Gerard Manley Hopkins is the now accredited as the author of some of the finest and most complex poems in the English language. As a Victorian poet, Roman Catholic convert, and Jesuit priest, Hopkins pioneered a revolutionary form of meter he termed "sprung rhythm" in his first major work, "The Wreck of the Deutschland." This poem, like most of Hopkins' work, reflects both his belief in the doctrine that human...
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Measure for Measure - William Shakespeare - Measure for Measure is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1603 or 1604. Originally published in the First Folio of 1623, where it was listed as a comedy, the play's first recorded performance occurred in 1604. The play's main themes include justice, "mortality and mercy in Vienna," and the dichotomy between corruption and purity: "some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall." Mercy...
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All's Well That Ends Well (1607) is a comedy by William Shakespeare. All's Well That Ends Well was likely inspired by the tale of Giletta di Narbona from Boccaccio's Decameron. Unpopular during Shakespeare's lifetime, the play remains one of his least staged works to this day. Despite this, scholars praise All's Well That Ends Well for its moral ambiguity. "The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together, our virtues would be proud...
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Although one of his lesser known plays, Shakespeare's considerable abilities as a playwright are readily apparent in "Troilus and Cressida." This historical and tragic 'problem play', thought to be inspired by Chaucer, Homer, and some of Shakespeare's history-recording contemporaries, is initially a tale of a man and woman in love during the Trojan War. When Cressida is given to the Greeks in exchange for a prisoner of war, Troilus is determined to...
8) Coriolanus
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Shakespeare's tragic drama about a Roman general tested by rioting, war, rejection-and his own all-consuming anger.
Enraged by the withholding of food, the common people of the Roman Republic are rebelling against the elite. In this battle between plebeians and patricians, Caius Marcius has little patience for those he considers beneath him and his family.
After his military victory in the city of Corioli, Marcius is given the nickname Coriolanus...
11) Henry V
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Believed to have been written in 1599, William Shakespeare's "Henry V" forms the final installment of a tetralogy of plays, which includes "Richard II", "Henry IV, Part I", and "Henry IV, Part II". The play focuses on the events surrounding the Battle of Agincourt during the Hundred Years' War. Henry, who is introduced in the earlier plays as a wild and undisciplined youth, has now come of age and ascended to the thrown following the death of his...
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There is no more authoritative collection of the poetry that Eliot himself wished to preserve than this volume, published two years before his death in 1965.
Poet, dramatist, critic, and editor, T. S. Eliot was one of the defining figures of twentieth-century poetry. This edition of Collected Poems 1909-1962 includes The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock along with Four Quartets, The Waste Land, and several other poems.
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In 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', Samuel Taylor Coleridge spins a compelling narrative of a seafarer bound by his haunting past voyage. Told in a lyrical ballad form, Coleridge's masterpiece melds the traditional with the innovative through its complex use of language, arresting imagery, and thematic depth. The poem is rich in maritime folklore and supernatural elements, yet at its core, it is a profound reflection on human guilt, redemption,...
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In Happy Days, Samuel Beckett pursues his relentless search for the meaning of existence, probing the tenuous relationships that bind one person to another, and each to the universe, to time past and time present. Once again, stripping theater to its barest essentials, Happy Days offers only two characters: Winnie, a woman of about fifty, and Willie, a man of about sixty. In the first act Winnie is buried up to her waist in a mound of earth, but still...
16) Arcadia
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In a large country house in Derbyshire in April 1809 sits Lady Thomasina Coverly, aged thirteen, and her tutor, Septimus Hodge. Through the window may be seen some of the "five hundred acres inclusive of lake" where Capability Brown's idealized landscape is about to give way to the Gothic style: "everything but vampires," as the garden historian Hannah Jarvis remarks to Bernard Nightingale when they stand in the same room 180 years later. Bernard...
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Field Work is the record of four years during which Seamus Heaney left the violence of Belfast to settle in a country cottage with his family in Glanmore, County Wicklow. Heeding "an early warning system to get back inside my own head," Heaney wrote poems with a new strength and maturity, moving from the political concerns of his landmark volume North to a more personal, contemplative approach to the world and to his own writing.
19) The sonnets
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Presents the original text of Shakespeare's sonnets side by side with a modern version, with marginal notes.
20) Timon of Athens
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"Timon of Athens" was first, published in the "First Folio" in 1623 and was likely, written by William Shakespeare in 1605 or 1606. Often regarded as one of the more difficult of Shakespeare's plays to categorize, "Timon of Athens" blends elements of comedy with components of tragedy in Timon's allegorical downfall and death. The play depicts an Athenian man, Timon, who is popular and wealthy and who selflessly gives away his possessions to a large...
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