Twelfth Night, first performed around 1600, probably at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, is the tale of separated brother and sister twins Sebastian and Viola and their love entanglements. It also offers the rich comic colours of Sir Toby Belch, Malvolio and Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Twelfth Night is part of Naxos AudioBooks’ exciting new series of complete dramatisations of the works of Shakespeare, in conjunction with Cambridge University Press. It uses the New Cambridge Shakespeare text, as ...

A Midsummer Night’s Dream must be one of the most enduringly popular of Shakespeare’s plays, and it is not difficult to see why: the work blends several kinds of comedy with a powerful atmosphere of magic and mystery and a satisfying set of contrasts between city and country, reason and imagination, love and infatuation.

Macbeth, Shakespeare’s last great tragedy, has remained one of the most popular plays since it’s first performance in 1606 probably in front of King James. This exciting new audiobook production is directed with fresh imagination by Fiona Shaw who breaks the conventional strait jacket that has hampered the development of Shakespeare on audio. We are as much in the twenty-first century as in medieval Scotland the tensions, the politics, the struggle for power and dark ambition is part of ou...

Bellerophon and the winged horse Pegasus launch into the blue sky in search of the dreaded three-headed Chimera, but will success go to the hero’s head? Orpheus, devastated by the death of his wife, Eurydice, dares the dangers of the Kingdom of the Dead in an attempt to bring her back to life. Echo loves Narcissus but he only loves himself: a story that can only end in sadness. These and other colourful legends from Ancient Greece are retold in lively form by Benjamin Soames, with classica...

The glory of Ancient Greece is all around us, even in the 21st century, because Greece was the cradle of Western civilisation. We know about the gods and their characters Zeus, Athene, Apollo, Ares, Aphrodite and their heroes, both legendary (Heracles) and historical (Alexander the Great). Architecture, mathematics, politics, philosophy, observation of nature and the cosmos and much more emerged in Ancient Greece. Hugh Griffith’s entertaining but informative account of the people and the h...

For a century Bram Stoker’s Dracula has reigned supreme as the undisputed masterpiece of horror writing. We have all grown up under the shadow of the elegant Count, at once an attractive, brutal and erotic creature of the night. In 1897 Bram Stoker wrote a story expressing the most persistent nightmare of the human condition. Take this opportunity to dream again…

Hamlet, which dates from 1600-1601, is the first in Shakespeare’s great series of four tragedies, the others being Othello (1603), King Lear (1605) and Macbeth (1606). In writing this extraordinary play Shakespeare effectively reinvented tragedy after an interval of roughly two thousand years we have to go back to the Greek dramatists of fifth-century Athens to find anything of comparable depth and maturity.

Classic Poems for Girls is a collection of over 25 funny, whimsical and moving poems for 510-year olds, designed to fuel the imagination. From the adventures of the Jumblies, who sail away in a sieve, to the sticky end of a girl named Matilda, to the courtship of a maiden who lived long ago in a kingdom by the sea, there’s a poem to suit any feeling or mood. Seasoned Naxos AudioBooks readers Roy McMillan, Laura Paton, Anne-Marie Piazza, and Benjamin Soames work their magic on the works of ...

‘In a Nutshell’, the new 1-CD audiobook series from Naxos AudioBooks, continues with a fascinating history of Afghanistan. For centuries it has been the playground of big powers, from Alexander the Great to the British Empire and the Soviet Union. It has been torn by internal strife and ideological differences, yet Afghans, tribal though they may be, remain a proud nation. Here is a short history, setting the background to the current situation.

Naxos AudioBooks presents the history of the Plantaganets as seen through the eyes of Shakespeare. These easy-to-understand introductions feature key speeches and scenes from the plays themselves, and are very accessible for children approaching Shakespeare for the first time, as well as being an invaluable aid to the history of the Plantaganets, from Richard II to Richard III. This set covers: Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 and 2, Henry V, Henry VI parts 1, 2, and 3 and Richard III. Read by...

The Victorian era was a time of great change and rapid progress. Britain was undergoing the most tremendous development. Scientific discoveries had prompted the Industrial Revolution, which made Britain the world leader in iron and steel production. Science was undergoing a revolution, enabled by the groundbreaking work of Michael Faraday, who led the Royal Institution. Great swathes of Central Africa were mapped by the explorer David Livingstone and the understanding of humankind’s place ...

Which king liked to bathe while the band played Rule Britannia? Which queen was so fat she needed a hoist to get on the throne? Which prince shut his wife out of Westminster Abbey to prevent her from being crowned? Who was the blood-thirstiest monarch of them all? Kings and Queens of England is a no-holds-barred account of the British monarchy with the gossip and gore left in, and nothing left out! It leaves no stone unturned in its mission to portray kings and queens as they really were, ...