On the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth's birth comes a highly imaginative and vivid portrait of a revolutionary poet who embodied the spirit of his agePublished in time for the 250th anniversary of William Wordsworth's birth, this is the biography of a great poetic genius, a revolutionary who changed the world. Wordsworth rejoiced in the French Revolution and played a central role in the cultural upheaval that we call the Romantic Revolution.He and his fellow Romantics change...

Can you be re-lit by poetry? This little book offers everyone one of the oldest of all remedies for stress: the reading of poetry.Intended to help you endure some of your stressful moments and painful experiences, these poems tell us we are not alone. Returned again and again over the centuries by great imaginations are love and death and memory – remembrance of childhood joy, of happy days and beautiful places, of loved ones we have lost or feeling at peace and at...

The newly revised, wonderfully authoritative First Folio of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, edited by acclaimed Shakespearean scholars Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen and endorsed by the world-famous Royal Shakespeare CompanyCombining cutting-edge textual editing, superb annotations and commentary, a readable design, and bonus features for students, theater professionals, and general readers, this landmark edition sets a new standard in Shakespearean literature for ...

“One man in his time plays many parts,His acts being seven ages.”In this illuminating, innovative biography, Jonathan Bate, one of today’s most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, has found a fascinating new way to tell the story of the great dramatist. Using the Bard’s own immortal list of a man’s seven ages in As You Like It, Bate deduces the crucial events of Shakespeare’s life and connects them to his world and work as never before.Here is the author as...

An immensely pleasurable biography of two interwoven, tragic figures: John Keats and F. Scott FitzgeraldIn this radiant dual biography, Jonathan Bate explores the fascinating parallel lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald, writers who worked separately—on different continents, a century apart, in distinct genres—but whose lives uncannily echoed.Not only was Fitzgerald profoundly influenced by Keats, titling Tender is the Night and other works from the poet's lines, but ...

No dramatist has ever seen with more frightening clarity into the heart and mind of a murderer than has Shakespeare in this compelling tragedy of evil. Taunted into asserting his “masculinity” by his ambitious wife, Macbeth chooses to embrace the Weird Sisters’ prophecy and kill his king–and thus, seals his own doom. Fast-moving and bloody, this drama has the extraordinary energy that derives from a brilliant plot replete with treachery and murder, and from Shakespeare’s compelling portrai...

Though this great tragedy of unsurpassed intensity and emotion is played out against Renaissance splendor, its story of the doomed marriage of a Venetian senator’s daughter, Desdemona, to a Moorish general, Othello, is especially relevant to modern audiences. The differences in race and background create an initial tension that allows the horrifyingly envious villain Iago methodically to promote the “green-eyed monster” jealousy, until, in one of the most deeply moving scenes in theatrical...

This wisely funny comedy, which contains some of Shakespeare’s loveliest poetry, contrasts a court’s world of envy and rivalry with a forest’s world of compassion and harmony. In the Forest of Arden, the banished young heroine, Rosalind, disguised as a gentleman farmer, encounters an extraordinary assemblage of characters, including a fool, a malcontent traveler, her own banished father, and the banished young man she loves. Romantic happiness triumphs, even as we laugh at the excesses of ...

A king foolishly divides his kingdom between his scheming two oldest daughters and estranges himself from the daughter who loves him. So begins this profoundly moving and disturbing tragedy that, perhaps more than any other work in literature, challenges the notion of a coherent and just universe. The king and others pay dearly for their shortcomings–as madness, murder, and the anguish of insight and forgiveness that arrive too late combine to make this an all-embracing tragedy of evil and...

An illuminating and authoritative study of the 20th-century English poet and children's writer's life and work.Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He was one of Britain's most important poets.With an equal gift for poetry and prose, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter-writer since John Keats. His magnetic personality and insatiable appetite for friendship,...

One of the greatest plays of all time, the compelling tragedy of the tormented young prince of Denmark continues to capture the imaginations of modern audiences worldwide. Confronted with evidence that his uncle murdered his father, and with his mother’s infidelity, Hamlet must find a means of reconciling his longing for oblivion with his duty as avenger. The ghost, Hamlet’s feigned madness, Ophelia’s death and burial, the play within a play, the “closet scene” in which Hamlet accuses his ...