Shakespeare Essays

Why Shakespeare? What explains our continued fascination with his poems and plays? In Living with Shakespeare, Susannah Carson invites 40 actors, directors, scholars, and writers to reflect on why his work is still such a vital part of our culture.

Friendship, betrayal, wisdom, humour, epic romance, jealousy, adventure, bravery and murder. There's everything in those iconic Shakespeare stories. His work transcends generations and appeals endlessly to other writers. His dramatic structures are both simple and complicated, intertwined with numerous relationships, which reappear in our lives again and again. This iconic collection of Shakespeare tales includes 20 of his most prominent works adapted by Edith Nesbit and transformed into modern English.

Enjoy the most notable plays of William Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello. Shakespeare was known for his writings on tragedies and these four works are known to be some of the finest tragedies ever written.

“So often people ask me if there’s a book on story I can recommend. This is the one. I can’t recommend it highly enough.”––Alexa Junge, writer/producer, Friends, Sex and the City, The West Wing A master class of 27 lessons, drawn from 27 diverse narratives, for novelists...

From the acclaimed author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler comes a stirring manifesto on love in the modern age. Who wrote the book of love? In an impassioned polemic, Ron Rosenbaum—who has written books on the mysteries of Hitler’s evil, the magic of Shakespeare’s words, and...

14.10.1771: Der junge Goethe, 22 Jahre alt, hält eine selbstverfasste Rede auf William Shakespeare anlässlich des Shakespeare-Tages in Frankfurt/Main. Er hält sie im Familienkreis, nimmt kein Blatt vor den Mund und erklärt, warum der Barde aus Stratford-upon-Avon so wichtig für die Entwicklung des Dramas in der Sturm und Drang-Zeit war. Shakespeare räumte auf mit der aristotelischen Dramenkonzeption der Einheit von Ort, Zeit und Raum und gab den Autoren erst dadurch die wahre künstlerische Freiheit. Ein äußerst bedeutsamer Grundlagentext der Literaturgeschichte!