Publication date: 1982-12
RRP: £12.93
Price: £14.92
Review George Bernard Shaw / Sussex Publications:
Creator: David Threlfall
Publication date: 1999-09-06
RRP: £10.99
Price: £80.00
Review A Midsummer Night's Dream: A BBC Radio 3 Full-cast Dramatisation. Starring David Threlfall & Cast (BBC Radio Collection) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 2004-09
Dewey code: 792.102908
Price: £9.99
Review The Complete Arkangel Shakespeare: Richard II (Arkangel Complete Shakespeare) / Audio Partners Publishing:
Publication date: 1997-07
RRP: £9.99
Price: £11.98
Review Island of Jacarandas (Audio Theatre Adventure) / Quantum Leap:
Publication date: 1997-07
RRP: £11.74
Price: £13.73
Review Jane Eyre (Audio Theatre Classic) / Quantum Leap:
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 2004-09
Dewey code: 792.102908
Price: £9.99
Review The Complete Arkangel Shakespeare: the Two Noble Kinsmen (Arkangel Complete Shakespeare) / Audio Partners Publishing:Shakespeare's last dramatic work, Two Noble Kinsmen has often been marginalised by editors who believe that Shakespeare was just one of its many writers. This does a disservice to what is a fascinating and haunting play. The two noble kinsmen of the play's title are Palamon and his cousin Arcite, Thebans who have sworn a vow of friendship until death, claiming, "Is there record of any two that loved/Better than we do?" King Theseus of Athens leads an invasion against Thebes, and returns to Athens with the two cousins, who both fall in love with Princess Emilia, Theseus' sister-in-law. Both become rivals for Emilia's hand, incurring the wrath of Theseus. The action moves to the forest, where Palamon and Arcite prepare to duel over Emilia, only to be interrupted by Theseus, who delays the duel for one month, commanding that whoever wins the duel will marry Emilia, whilst the loser will be executed. On the day Arcite defeats Palamon, but is then crushed under his own horse. As he dies he bequeaths Emilia's hand to his cousin. The play ends with their wedding ceremony. Two Noble Kinsmen concludes with a note of resignation, as Theseus says "Let us be thankful/For that which is, and with you leave dispute/That are above our question", but as always, it is dangerous to see this as Shakespeare pronouncing on life itself, or simply another character in one of his plays voicing a particularly elegiac viewpoint on the sad events portrayed. -Jerry Brotton.
Authors
- Naxos AudioBooks
- William Shakespeare
Publication date: 1997-10-23
Dewey code: 822
RRP: £18.79
Price: £13.49
Review Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Audio Cassettes: Prince of Denmark (New Cambridge Shakespeare Audio) / Cambridge University Press:Undoubtedly the most famous of all of Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet remains one of the most enduring but also enigmatic pieces of western literature. The story of Hamlet, the young Prince of Denmark, his tortured relationship with his mother, and his quest to avenge his father's murder at the hand of his brother Claudius has fascinated writers and audiences ever since it was written around 1600. For many years interest focused on both Hamlet's inability to avenge his father's death, claiming that "the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought", and, according to none other than Freud, his oedipal fixation with his mother. However, more recently critics have turned their attention to Hamlet's bold theatrical self-reflexivity (most famously reflected in the performance of "The Mousetrap"), its fascination with issues of theology and Renaissance humanism, and its dense, complex poetic language. What is so remarkable about the play is the way in which it tends to uncannily reflect the concerns of different epochs. As a result, Hamlet has been at different moments defined as a romantic rebel, an angst-ridden existentialist, a paralysed intellectual and an ambivalent New Man. Whatever subsequent generations make of Hamlet, they are unlikely to exhaust the possibilities of this most extraordinary play. -Jerry Brotton.
Edition: New title
Publication date: 1991-07-08
Dewey code: 372
RRP: £10.52
Price: £10.52
Review Rainbow Recorder Course Level 1 Starter book cassette (Rainbow Recorder Course) / Cambridge University Press:
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 2004-09
Dewey code: 792.102908
RRP: £9.99
Price: £8.42
Review The Complete Arkangel Shakespeare: Measure for Measure (Arkangel Complete Shakespeare) / Audio Partners Publishing:
Authors
- Naxos AudioBooks
- William Shakespeare
Dewey code: 820
RRP: £14.09
Price: £9.12
Review The Tempest Audio Cassette (New Cambridge Shakespeare Audio) / Cambridge University Press:
Edition: Abridged Ed
Publication date: 2000-05-05
RRP: £8.99
Price: £4.97
Review Forty Four: A Dublin Memoir / Macmillan Audio Books:Irish writers have been on something of a roll recently. Roddy Doyle, Joseph O'Connor and Frank McCourt have all become international bestsellers and any new talent is on the wrong- -or right, depending how you look at it-end of instant hype. So where does that leave Peter Sheridan? His plays have been performed all over the world and he won the Rooney Prize for Literature in 1977 and yet he remains a comparative unknown. All this may change with the publication of his latest book. The genre is straightforward and familiar enough. 44: A Dublin Memoir is a rites-of-passage book. It starts at the beginning of the 1960s with young Peter, aged 8, scrabbling around the roof trying to fix the television aerial to it. And just as the television allows a glimpse into a world beyond the backstreets of Dublin, so we see Peter wise up from wide-eyed boy to knowing 18-year-old. There's plenty of good material here. There's his Ma and Da, his umpteen brothers and sisters, their lodgers, births, deaths-all against a backdrop of an Ireland that is losing its innocence. [+]But to an extent that's all by the by. Sure, it's important to catch both the humour and pathos, but where Sheridan really triumphs is in his ability to capture both the mind and voice of adolescence. So many books of this type credit the teenager with too much insight and reflectiveness. But adolescence isn't like that. I know that teenagers imagine they are fantastically deep, but the simple truth is that they aren't. Growing up is too fast, too overwhelming to really understand at the time. It only makes sense in retrospect. And this is how Sheridan tells it. He conveys the ambivalence of growing up brilliantly. By any objective token, his father is an abusive, arrogant, selfish man. But Sheridan does not ram this down our throats. Instead, he lets the facts speak for themselves while musing on the love and affection he holds for him. This childish dichotomy-the ability to accept the unacceptable and to believe the unbelievable-runs through the book. We see it in his schooling and in his dealings with other members of his family and friends. This consistency of tone creates a powerful picture of the confusion of growing up. And made me profoundly grateful that I don't have to go through it again. -John Crace.
Creator: Sue Rodwell
Publication date: 1999-07
RRP: £11.99
Price: £13.98
Review Great British Trials: Dr.H.H.Crippen (Great British Trials) / Mr Punch Audio Books:
Creator: Roger Allam
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 1998-03-12
Dewey code: 792.2302908
RRP: £8.99
Price: £6.99
Review The Taming of the Shrew: Unabridged (Arkangel) / Penguin Audiobooks:One of the most controversial and problematic of all of Shakespeare's plays, The Taming of the Shrew is a typical Elizabethan domestic comedy written around 1592. Petruchio, a gentleman of Verona, arrives in Padua and announces to his friends that "I come to wive it wealthily in Padua; / If wealthily, then happily in Padua". He soon finds that a group of men keen to marry Bianca, the younger daughter of rich old Baptista, are frustrated by her elder, "shrewish" sister, Katherine. There is much subsequent hilarity as Bianca's suitors make a bet with Petruchio that he cannot "tame" and marry Katherine. Despite Katherine's protestations, Petruchio goes ahead with the match, using deliberately unorthodox behaviour to confuse Katherine (including a scene where he starves her), claiming that "this is the way to kill a wife with kindness". The play culminates with a scene of Katherine's apparently spontaneous subjection to her husband's will, where she places her hand beneath her husband's foot, and tells the other wives present that "thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper". The play's gratuitous scenes of women being abused and vilified in the name of "comedy" has made many directors and critics very uncomfortable with the play, and many feminist critics have condemned contemporary productions of the play as reproducing certain 16th-century stereotypes concerning women who speak out against male authority. -Jerry Brotton.
Creator: Harriet Walter
Publication date: 1995-04-20
Price: £9.99
Review The Shakespeare Collection / Hodder & Stoughton Audio Books:
Authors
- John Wilders
- Stanley W. Wells
Publication date: 1982-12
RRP: £12.93
Price: £12.93
Review "Cymbeline" / Sussex Publications:
Creator: Simon Russell Beale
Publication date: 1995-10
Price: £5.99
Review The Shakespeare Collection: Performed by Juliet Stevenson & Simon Russell Beale (Timeless Classics) / Listen for Pleasure:
Creator: et al
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 1998-03-12
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £8.99
Price: £4.45
Review King Henry IV: Unabridged Pt.2 (Arkangel) / Penguin Audiobooks:
Creator: Gordon Griffin
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2003-06
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £11.99
Price: £5.08
Review Dead Souls / Naxos AudioBooks:
Creator: Ian:PER>et al Pepperell
Edition: Abridged Ed
Publication date: 2000-07-09
RRP: £8.99
Price: £5.50
Review Troilus and Cressida (Arkangel) / Penguin Audiobooks:One of Shakespeare's most notoriously difficult and cynical plays, labelled a "Problem Comedy", Troilus and Cressida has perplexed critics and theatre directors, and after Shakespeare's lifetime it was not performed again until 1907. In many ways the play's difficulty is a surprise; the story of Troilus and Cressida was a popular theme, drawn from Homer's Iliad and Chaucer's own Troilus and Criseyde, as was its classical setting, the Greek siege of Troy, led by Agamemnon, Achilles, Ajax, Diomedes and Ulysses. Within the walls of Troy, Prince Troilus falls madly in love with Cressida, daughter of the deserter Calchas. His love is intense and frenetic-"I am giddy, expectation whirls round me," but turns to bitter disillusion when Cressida defects to the Greek camp and flirts with Diomedes. As the war and conflict over the abduction of Helen whirls around the doomed romance, the play delights in its complex syntax and cynical images of waste, decay, corruption and mutability, summed up in Ulysses' comment that, "Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all / To envious and calumniating time. " The play's cynical open-ended quality has frustrated many readers, but gives the play a remarkably modern, contemporary sensibility. -Jerry Brotton.
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 1999-10
Dewey code: 822.33
RRP: £9.99
Price: £0.97
Review Twelfth Night (New Cambridge Shakespeare and Naxos Audiobooks) / Naxos AudioBooks:One of Shakespeare's finest comedies, Twelfth Night was written at the same time as Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida, and whilst it shares their fascination with sex, death and confused identities, its exuberant comedy and linguistic inventiveness rises above the introspection of these plays. Viola and her twin brother Sebastian are separated in a storm, which washes them both up at different points on the shores of Illyria. Believing each other to be dead, both attempt to survive by using their wits. Viola cross-dresses and enters the service of the lovesick Orsino, in love with Olivia, an heiress in mourning for the loss of her brother. Orsino's saucy young page Cesario (Viola) soon falls in love with "his" master, who tells "him", "all is semblative a woman's part". Unfortunately, whilst Viola falls in love with Orsino, Olivia falls in love with her alter ego, Cesario, whilst also being pursued at the same time by her pompous servant Malvolio. Olivia's house is also turned upside down by the antics of her drunken uncle, Sir Toby Belch, and the whole crazy situation reaches boiling point when Sebastian reappears. Despite the madcap plot, Twelfth Night remains one of Shakespeare's most complex and inventive comedies, fascinated with questions of cross-dressing, gender confusion, language and inversion, as well as retaining a darker edge to some of its laughter. -Jerry Brotton.
| Models & Brands:
George Bernard Shaw, A Midsummer Night's Dream: A BBC Radio 3 Full-cast Dramatisation. Starring David Threlfall & Cast (BBC Radio Collection), The Complete Arkangel Shakespeare: Richard II (Arkangel Complete Shakespeare), Island of Jacarandas (Audio Theatre Adventure), Jane Eyre (Audio Theatre Classic), The Complete Arkangel Shakespeare: the Two Noble Kinsmen (Arkangel Complete Shakespeare), Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Audio Cassettes: Prince of Denmark (New Cambridge Shakespeare Audio), Rainbow Recorder Course Level 1 Starter book cassette (Rainbow Recorder Course), The Complete Arkangel Shakespeare: Measure for Measure (Arkangel Complete Shakespeare), The Tempest Audio Cassette (New Cambridge Shakespeare Audio), Forty Four: A Dublin Memoir, Great British Trials: Dr.H.H.Crippen (Great British Trials), The Taming of the Shrew: Unabridged (Arkangel), The Shakespeare Collection, "Cymbeline", The Shakespeare Collection: Performed by Juliet Stevenson & Simon Russell Beale (Timeless Classics), King Henry IV: Unabridged Pt.2 (Arkangel), Dead Souls, Troilus and Cressida (Arkangel), Twelfth Night (New Cambridge Shakespeare and Naxos Audiobooks) |
