Authors
- Jo Shapcott
- Helen Dunmore
- British Council
- Elizabeth Jennings
- U.A. Fanthorpe
Dewey code: 808
RRP: £11.75
Price: £5.00
Review The Poetry Quartets 5: v. 5 (Poetry Quartets) / Bloodaxe Books Ltd:
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 1999-02-12
Dewey code: 822
RRP: £8.99
Price: £3.49
Review Titus Andronicus: Unabridged (Arkangel) / Penguin Audiobooks:Shakespeare's most violent and gory play, Titus Andronicus was written in 1592, and represents the dramatist's first foray into the popular genre of revenge tragedy (many editors argue with at least one other collaborator). The result was spectacular, including scenes of murder, human sacrifice, rape, bodily mutilation and cannibalism. Set in late-imperial Rome, the action begins with the Roman general Titus Andronicus and his triumphant return from wars with the Goths. Leading Queen Tamora and her sons as prisoners, Titus stumbles into a power struggle between Saturninus and his brother Bassianus. Titus fatally backs Saturninus, who rapidly turns on the old general and marries Tamora. The implications for the Andronicus family are disastrous. More of Titus' sons are killed, his daughter Lavinia is brutally raped by Tamora's sons, and as Titus begins his descent into madness and despair he even has his own hand cut off in an act of awful trickery. As Titus plots his bloody revenge, he reflects that "Rome is but a wilderness of tigers". The ending is one of the most gruesome conclusions to any dramatic tragedy, and leaves Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs looking quite restrained. Although the play has put audiences off for centuries due to its apparently gratuitous violence, more recently critics have discerned something more to it than pure shock, but that might say more about us than the Elizabethans. [+]-Jerry Brotton.
Publication date: 2001-10-08
RRP: £3.99
Price: £3.99
Review "Tweenies": It's Showtime! (Tweenies) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Creator: Trevor Eaton
Publication date: 1995-05
Dewey code: 811
RRP: £5.50
Price: £2.74
Review The Merchant's Prologue and Tale (Geoffrey Chaucer - the Canterbury Tales) / Pavilion Records Ltd:
Creator: Jerome Dempsey
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 1995-05-22
Dewey code: 808
RRP: £10.99
Price: £10.99
Review The Crucible: Performed by Stuart Pankin, Jerome Dempsey & Cast / HarperCollins Audio:
Creator: etc.
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 1999-11-25
Dewey code: 822
RRP: £8.99
Price: £4.74
Review Coriolanus: Unabridged (Arkangel) / Penguin Audiobooks:
Creator: John Gielgud
Publication date: 1991-12-05
Dewey code: 822
RRP: £10.99
Price: £6.52
Review Sonnets: Unabridged / HarperCollins Audio:
Creator: et al
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 1999-05-27
Dewey code: 822
RRP: £8.99
Price: £1.99
Review Pericles: Unabridged (Arkangel audiobooks) / Penguin Audiobooks:Controversy has surrounded Pericles for centuries, due to the fact that critics and editors have argued that much of the play was written between 1607 and 1608 by one of Shakespeare's inferior collaborators, and that it shows in both its style and content. However, Shakespeare was clearly the driving force behind the play, and it is important to remember that it was one of the most popular plays of its time. Famous for its resurrection of John Gower, the 14th-century English writer, who acts as the play's chorus, Pericles is a play that is obsessed with incest. The dramatic action begins in Antioch, where Pericles travels to solve the riddle of King Antiochus, who "to incest did provoke" his daughter. When Pericles realises Antiochus' terrible secret, he flees, wandering the seas, where he meets his wife Thaisa, who apparently dies while giving birth to her daughter Marina during a terrible storm. Pericles' grief is compounded by the apparent death of his daughter while staying at Tarsus some months later. She has in fact been sold into sexual slavery, and as Pericles resumes his wanderings, Marina battles to retain her "peevish chastity". As with many of Shakespeare's later plays, or romances, recognition and reunion occurs in the most unlikely of circumstances. Despite questions of authorship and textual corruption, Pericles continues to fascinate audiences and critics with its dark and ambivalent account of the relations between fathers and daughters. -Jerry Brotton.
Creator: et al
Publication date: 1999-08-26
Dewey code: 822
RRP: £8.99
Price: £1.89
Review The Two Gentlemen of Verona: Unabridged (Arkangel) / Penguin Audiobooks:One of Shakespeare's earliest comedies, and unjustly neglected over the years, The Two Gentlemen of Verona has deserved its growing critical reputation over recent years. The play dramatises the entangled relations between the two gentlemen of the play's title, Valentine and Proteus. Valentine leaves Verona for Milan to seek his fortune, whilst Proteus stays to be near his love, Julia. Spurned by Julia, Proteus heads for Milan, where he finds himself a rival of Valentine for the hand of Silvia, the Duke's daughter. Julia the reappears, disguised in boy's clothes as Proteus' page. As in many of Shakespeare's later comedies, the lovers flee to the forest, where confusion and conflict is finally resolved, and the two gentlemen are reunited not only with their "correct" lovers, but also with each other. The play is particularly interesting for its dramatisation of the intense friendship between Valentine and Proteus, which it often characterises as more intimate and meaningful than relations with women. Proteus complains that Julia "hast metamorphosed me" into something he cannot understand, and the play suggests that social and sexual relations between men are often more satisfying than the dangerous instability involved in wooing women. -Jerry Brotton.
Publication date: 1978
Dewey code: 808
RRP: £6.95
Price: £4.88
Review Brimstone and Treacle: Play (Acting Edition) / Dennis Potter:
Creator: et al
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 1998-08-27
Dewey code: 822
RRP: £8.99
Price: £2.99
Review King John: Unabridged (Arkangel complete Shakespeare) / Penguin Audiobooks:One of Shakespeare's most unpopular history plays, King John deals with the life and death of King John, who reigned from 1199 to 1216. This is as early as Shakespeare goes in his treatment of English history, concentrating more successfully on the later 14th and 15th centuries in the plays which stretch from Richard II to Henry VI. As a result, King John suffers from being so historically distant in time, as well as offering a rather weak and vacillating king, who lacks the charisma and authority of Richard III or Henry V. The play begins with King John struggling to retain his throne, under attack from rebellious courtiers and Philip, the king of France. As the quarrel escalates into war with France, the plays begins to take on a contemporary Elizabethan flavour-the feared invasion from a foreign (Catholic) nation, and the extent to which such an invasion is based on the questionable paternity of King John (like Queen Elizabeth, John is accused of being a bastard and is excommunicated). The play is saved from its rather colourless political machinations by Philip the Bastard, John's favourite, a dramatic forerunner of dubious but charismatic malcontents like Edmund in King Lear. It is also Philip who is given the most powerful and patriotic lines, when he claims that "This England never did, nor never shall, / Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror". King John's mysterious and anticlimactic death through illness at the end of the play deflates expectations-something that could be said of the play as a whole. -Jerry Brotton.
Creator: Stephen Tompkinson
Publication date: 1997-05
Price: £9.99
Review Thriller Playhouse: The Mysteries of Max Carrados Vol 2 (BBC Radio Drama) / Mr Punch Audio Books:
Creator: Ian:PER>et al Pepperell
Edition: Abridged edition
Publication date: 2000-07-09
RRP: £8.99
Price: £3.49
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.
Publication date: 1992-02-01
Price: £12.00
Review Sylvia Plath Reads / Caedmon:
Creator: Martin Cook
Publication date: 1997-11-27
Price: £5.99
Review You Wait Till I'm Older Than You!: Unabridged (Puffin Audiobooks) / Penguin Children's Audiobooks:
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 1999-11-25
Dewey code: 822
RRP: £8.99
Price: £2.48
Review Timon of Athens: Unabridged (Arkangel) / Penguin Audiobooks:A messy, uneven and disillusioned play, Timon of Athens is rarely studied or performed because of scepticism regarding both its authorship and completion. Like Pericles there seems little doubt that Shakespeare wrote the majority, but quite what he was trying to do is another matter. Timon of Athens is rich and generous, happy to provide his friends, servants and acquaintances with money whenever they require it. Only the cynical Apemantus questions the soundness of Timon's actions, and the motives of his supposed friends, wondering at "what a number of men eats Timon, and he sees 'em not. It grieves me to see so many dip their meat in one man's blood. " When Timon's creditors ask for payment of their loans, Timon goes to his friends, but they all refuse to help him. Even worse, Timon's one loyal friend Alcibiades is exiled from Athens. After renouncing all his friends at one last banquet, Timon retires to a misanthropic life as a hermit in a cave. As he rails against "yellow, glittering precious gold", he completely renounces mankind, to die alone in his cave, his epitaph claiming that "Here lie I, Timon, who alive / All living men did hate". One of Shakespeare's more puzzling plays, Timon of Athens is unusually bleak and unforgiving, with Timon behaving like an unsympathetic version of Lear (they were both written within a couple of years of each other). [+]-Jerry Brotton.
Publication date: 1998-09-07
Dewey code: 808
RRP: £10.99
Price: £4.95
Review Alan Bennett at the BBC (BBC Radio Collection) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Creator: John Gielgud
Publication date: 1992-02-20
Dewey code: 822
RRP: £10.99
Price: £0.01
Review Ages of Man: Readings from Shakespeare / HarperCollins Audio:
Creator: Trevor Eaton
Publication date: 1995-05
Dewey code: 811
RRP: £5.50
Price: £2.74
Review The Nun's Priest's Tale (Geoffrey Chaucer - the Canterbury Tales) / Pavilion Records Ltd:
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 2004-08
Dewey code: 792.102908
Price: £9.99
Review The Complete Arkangel Shakespeare: Henry VI Part 2 (Arkangel Complete Shakespeare) / Audio Partners Publishing:
| Models & Brands:
The Poetry Quartets 5: v. 5 (Poetry Quartets), Titus Andronicus: Unabridged (Arkangel), "Tweenies": It's Showtime! (Tweenies), The Merchant's Prologue and Tale (Geoffrey Chaucer - the Canterbury Tales), The Crucible: Performed by Stuart Pankin, Jerome Dempsey & Cast, Coriolanus: Unabridged (Arkangel), Sonnets: Unabridged, Pericles: Unabridged (Arkangel audiobooks), The Two Gentlemen of Verona: Unabridged (Arkangel), Brimstone and Treacle: Play (Acting Edition), King John: Unabridged (Arkangel complete Shakespeare), Thriller Playhouse: The Mysteries of Max Carrados Vol 2 (BBC Radio Drama), Troilus and Cressida (Arkangel), Sylvia Plath Reads, You Wait Till I'm Older Than You!: Unabridged (Puffin Audiobooks), Timon of Athens: Unabridged (Arkangel), Alan Bennett at the BBC (BBC Radio Collection), Ages of Man: Readings from Shakespeare, The Nun's Priest's Tale (Geoffrey Chaucer - the Canterbury Tales), The Complete Arkangel Shakespeare: Henry VI Part 2 (Arkangel Complete Shakespeare) |
