The sonnet sequence Les Amours de Cassandre, first published in 1552, established Pierre de Ronsard as the outstanding French poet of his time. He was mentioned approvingly by Montaigne, admired throughout Europe, and fêted by the French Crown and foreign monarchs such as Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I. Based to some degree on a real relationship with an identifiable woman, Cassandra Salviati, the sequence combines the passionate narrative of the poet's love for an unattainable beauty...

A collection of three medieval English poems, translated by Tolkien for the modern-day reader and containing romance, tragedy, love, sex and honour.Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl are two poems by an unknown author written in about 1400. Sir Gawain is a romance, a fairy-tale for adults, full of life and colour; but it is also much more than this, being at the same time a powerful moral tale which examines religious and social values.Pearl is appar...

'I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death,' John Keats soberly prophesied in 1818 as he started writing the blankverse epic Hyperion. Today he endures as the archetypal Romantic genius who explored the limits of the imagination and celebrated the pleasures of the senses but suffered a tragic early death. Edmund Wilson counted him as 'one of the half dozen greatest English writers,' and T. S. Eliot has paid tribute to the Shakespearean quality of Keats's greatness....

The modern, unacademic idiom of A.D. Melville's translation opens the way to a fresh understanding of Ovid's unique and elusive vision of reality.

‘Finally I realised that I had been practising for this job every time I wrote a quatrain . . . I had spent all this time – the greater part of a lifetime – preparing my instruments.’The Divine Comedy is the precursor of modern literature, and Clive James’s vivid translation – his life’s work and decades in the making – presents Dante’s entire epic poem in a single song.While many poets and translators have attempted to capture the full gl...

A challenging, wide-ranging collection of monologues from history’s greatest dramatic worksFrom the stately and poetic Greek tragedies to the lively, bawdy Restoration comedies, the classical repertoire is a treasure trove of often-overlooked materials for male and female, young and old. The solo pieces collected here vary widely in mood, style, and level of challenge; they include a generous supply of Shakespeare and his contemporaries; and they’re fleshed out wit...

Phaedra * Oedipus * Medea * Trojan Women * Hercules Furens * Thyestes Seneca's plays are the product of a sensational, frightening, and oppressive period of history. Tutor to the emperor Nero, Seneca lived through uncertain and violent times, and his dramas depict the extremes of human behaviour. Rape, suicide, child-killing, incestuous love, madness and mutilation afflict the characters, who are obsessed and destroyed by their feelings. Passion is constantly set against r...

“Under James’s uncanny touch, seven long centuries drop away, and the great poem is startlingly fresh and new.”—Stephen GreenblattThe Divine Comedy is the precursor of modern literature, and Clive James’s translation—decades in the making—gives us the entire epic as a single, coherent, and compulsively readable lyric poem. For the first time ever in an English translation, James makes the bold choice of switching from the terza rima composition of the orig...

The first female translator of the epic into English in over sixty years, Stephanie McCarter addresses accuracy in translation and its representation of women, gendered dynamics of power, and sexual violence in Ovid’s classic.A Penguin Classic HardcoverOvid’s Metamorphoses is an epic poem, but one that upturns almost every convention. There is no main hero, no central conflict, and no sustained objective. What it is about ...

The most comprehensive sourcebook of Shakespeare's monologues ever available in one volume.A detailed guide to approaching Shakespearean text, Speak the Speech! contains everything an actor needs to select and prepare a Shakespeare monologue for classwork, auditions, or performance.Included herein are over 150 monologues. Each one is placed in context with a brief introduction, is carefully punctuated in the manner that best illustrates its meaning, ...

`Now listen with good will, as I go straight to my subject matter, in which you may hear the double sorrows of Troilus in his love for Criseyde, and how she forsook him before she died' Like Romeo and Juliet, or Tristan and Iseult, the names of Troilus and Criseyde will always be united: a pair of lovers whose names are inseparable from passion and tragedy. Troilus and Criseyde is Chaucer's masterpiece and was prized for centuries as his supreme achievement. The story of how Troil...

Ovid's Metamorphoses is one of the most influential works of Western literature, inspiring artists and writers from Titian to Shakespeare to Salman Rushdie. These are some of the most famous Roman myths as you've never read them before—sensuous, dangerously witty, audacious—from the fall of Troy to birth of the minotaur, and many others that only appear in the Metamorphoses. Connected together by the immutable laws of change and metamorphosis, the myths tell the story of ...