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Planning a school or amateur Shakespeare production? The best way to experience the plays is to perform them, but getting started can be a challenge: The complete plays are too long and complex, while scene selections or simplified language are too limited. "The 30-Minute Shakespeare" is a new series of abridgements that tell the "story" of each play from start to finish while keeping the beauty of Shakespeare's language intact. Specific stage directions...

Based on Plutarch's account of the lives of Brutus, Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony, Julius Caesar was the first of Shakespeare's Roman history plays. Presented for the first time in 1599, the play reveals the great dramatist's consummate ability to explore and express the most profound human emotions and instincts. So clearly and urgently does it impact its insights into history and human behavior, Julius Caesar is traditionally among the first of...

Othello, the Moor of Venice is a tragedy by William Shakespeare believed to have been written in approximately 1603, and based on the Italian short story 'Un Capitano Moro' ('A Moorish Captain') by Cinthio, a disciple of Boccaccio, first published in 1565. The work revolves around four central characters: Othello, a Moorish general in the Venetian army; his wife Desdemona; his lieutenant, Cassio; and his trusted ensign Iago. Because of its varied...

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.

The story of a king who craves flattery-and the daughter who refuses him even at the cost of her own inheritance. King Lear wants nothing more than to be praised, and when he decides to divide his realm according to how much each of his daughters can impress him with their declarations of love, Goneril and Regan are quick to oblige. Only the youngest, Cordelia, cannot give him what he wants-and she is promptly cut out of his will. Lear's decision...

Folger Shakespeare Library is the world's leading center for Shakespeare studies. Each edition 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;...

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...

In The Tragedy of King Lear, the elderly King of England is ready to divide the kingdom among his three daughters. As a test, he asks them to proclaim their love for him. Goneril and Regan profess great love. Cordelia, the King's favorite daughter, refuses to put her love into words. Lear banishes Cordelia and divides the kingdom between Goneril and Regan. Goneril and Regan decide that their father is a nuisance and plot to get rid of him. His daughters'...

"Preeminent Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro shows how the tumultuous events in England in 1606 affected Shakespeare and shaped the three great tragedies he wrote that year -- King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. In the years leading up to 1606, since the death of Queen Elizabeth and the arrival in England of her successor, King James of Scotland, Shakespeare's great productivity had ebbed, and it may have seemed to some that his prolific...