First published in 1995, Ross provides a critical edition of Thomas Shadwell’s Bury Fair.

Thomas Shadwell (1642-1692) wrote a number of comic plays during his life. His drama featured broadly-based, coarse humor, and is filled with crude-but-vibrant characters drawn from the streets of Restoration London, individuals such as sharpers, whores, and eccentrics. His work is essentially plotless, but reeks with the odor of real people. Frank J. Morlock has created a composite drama (with plot!) from Shadwell's many works, but particularly employing pieces of The Woman Captain, The S...

The life and career of a Poet is often thought of as musing at a desk, or lying in a meadow, or on long journeys to find inspiration for their next masterwork. But more often than not a poet was a part-time profession in subservient submission to their actual, salary-paying job.In this volume we bring together those whose craft is the drafting of words into stories and plays that others read or watch. Of course, in Centuries past poetry was often interwoven into plays and yet, in t...

The language of Poetry is an art that most of us attempt at some point in our lives. Although its commonplace exposure has been somewhat marginalised in today’s often fast-paced lives we all recognise good verse that can empathise with our thoughts or open us up to experience new things in new ways, to better understand and to enjoy the many strands of our lives.But finding a starting point can be overwhelming, even off-putting, so in this series we offer up our Top 10 classic poet...

Poetry. A form of words that seems so elegantly simple in one verse and so cleverly complex in another. Each poet has a particular style, an individual and unique way with words and yet each of us seems to recognise the path and destination of where the verses lead, even if sometimes the full comprehension may be a little beyond us.Through the centuries every culture has produced verse to symbolize and to describe everything from everyday life, natural wonders, the human condition ...

A fire reveals a father's secrets. A ghost haunts the living. And a race across the Virginia frontier will determine the fate of knowledge itself.August 1765. When a laboratory accident burns Shadwell to the ground, twenty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson loses everything—his childhood home, his mother's belongings, the last physical traces of his family's history. But in the ruins, he discovers something that should not exist: a hidden compartment containing...