A Lion Was Learning to Ski. Humour, Limericks, Whimsical.

Written in rhyming couplets 'Losing It' is the story of Lucy, a luscious young virgin who goes to London to try losing her virginity.

“How I deplore the bogus waysOf society these days -A sort of national contestTo find out who can a se-lick best!”In this witty cutting version of Le Misanthrope Molière's angry hero Alceste becomes Alan - journalist, intellectual and free spirit-who finds himself adrift in a social whirl of false flattery and schmooze. In a world where nobody calls a spade a spade (or even knows what a spade is for), how can the cantankerous but high-minded Alan secure...

Lysistrata, frustrated at the ongoing violence of the civil war, convinces the women of Athens to deny their husbands sex, until a treaty for peace has been signed. Aristophanes is astonishingly ahead of his time in this, probably his greatest and most enduring comedy.

Ranjit Bolt updates Much Ado About Nothing with a merry new translation.In Much Ado About Nothing, a series of miscommunications and misunderstandings spiral out of control, leaving two sets of lovers to untangle their words and their hearts. Ranjit Bolt, an accomplished translator, takes on Shakespeare’s well-loved comedy to update much of the obscure language while maintaining the humor, characterization, and wit that audiences know and love. Fo...

“I try to follow the rule laid down by perhaps the greatest translator of all, John Dryden, who maintained that a translator should – and I paraphrase – make the version as entertaining as possible, while at the same time remaining as faithful as possible to the spirit of the original” – Ranjit Bolt.In this book, Ranjit Bolt takes what is essentially a practitioner's view of the art of literary translation. His observations are born of a quarter of a century's experience of transla...

Includes the plays The Liar, The Illusion, Le CidPierre Corneille (1606–84), the great seventeenth-century neoclassical dramatist, wrote over thirty plays during his long and varied career. Triumphant in both comedy and tragedy, his plays remain at the core of the repertory.When the young Molière saw The Liar (Le Menteur), a delightful chronicle of a pathological liar’s adventures in love, he decided to become a playwright. The Illusion (L’Illusion Comique)...

Juno, wife of Jove (Jupiter) is jealous of Alcmene, mother of Hercules by Jove, and has been persecuting Hercules by imposing labours on him, through her intermediary, the tyrant Eurystheus.The final labour, which Hercules has just completed, was the bringing up of Cereberus, the three-headed watchdog of the Underworld, up to the world above. To do this, Hercules has achieved the astonishing feat, never before accomplished, of returning from the realm of Death. Juno has now decided that si...

Don Juan Tenorio is an important and influential Spanish classic which gives a softened, romanticised version of the infamous hero and ends, uniquely, in his repentance and salvation. First seen in 1844, it is Zorrilla's best-known play and is still performed every year in Spain on All Souls' Day. The play, in Ranjit Bolt's stunning rhyming verse translations, was given an extensive tour by the Oxford Stage Company in late 1990.

L'Avare (1666) is Molière's great satire on materialism, a funny yet sophisticated story of cunning, guile and double-dealing, not only by the Miser himself, but also by the Miser's family and servants. First performed at the Festival Theatre, Chichester in 1995, it was revived at the Salisbury Playhouse in April 2001.Includes L'Etourdi (1653), the first, the fastest, and perhaps the funniest of Molière's verse comedies, in a new and highly entertaining translation...

In the year of the bicentenary of the death of Carlo Goldoni, one of Italy’s most brilliant dramatists, two of his greatest comedies are brought to life in Ranjit Bolt’s vibrant translations.The Venetian Twins is a classic tale of mistaken identity and the ensuing confusion. The play was given its premiere at the Royal Shakespeare Company in a production directed by Michael Bogdanov which enjoyed huge success in Stratford and London.Mirandolina is one of Goldoni’s best know...

pistache (pis-tash): a friendly spoof or parody of another's work. [Deriv uncertain. Possibly a cross between pastiche and p**stake.]From Thomas Hardy's football report to Dan Brown's visit to the cash dispenser, the work of the great and the not-so-great is here sent up with little hope of coming down.Most of these pieces began their life on Radio Four's The Write Stuff, but have been retooled for the printed page. Others, such as Martin Amis's fi...