Planning a school or amateur Shakespeare production? The best way to experience the plays is to perform them, but getting started can be a challenge: The complete plays are too long and complex, while scene selections or simplified language are too limited. "The 30-Minute Shakespeare" is a new series of abridgements that tell the "story" of each play from start to finish while keeping the beauty of Shakespeare's language intact. Specific stage directions...

As You Like It (1599) is a comedy by William Shakespeare. As You Like It was probably inspired by Thomas Lodge's Rosalynd, Euphues Golden Legacie (1587), a story based on "The Tale of Gamelyn," a Middle English romance. For its deconstruction of traditional gender roles and depiction of homoeroticism, As You Like It remains an important and frequently performed play in Shakespeare's oeuvre. "All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely...

Along with Sophocles and Euripides, Aristophanes is considered one of the three great Greek playwrights. Only eleven of his nearly forty plays survive in their entirety to this day. Of his extant works Aristophanes's "Lysistrata" is considered one of his finest and one of the truly great comedies from classical antiquity. Central to the work is the vow by the women of Greece to withhold sex from their husbands until they end the brutal war between...

Edward Baltram is overwhelmed with guilt. His nasty little prank has gone horribly wrong: He has fed his closest friend a sandwich laced with a hallucinogenic drug and the young man has fallen out of a window to his death. Edward searches for redemption through a reunion with his famous father, the reclusive painter Jesse Baltram. Funny and compelling, The Good Apprentice is at once a supremely sophisticated entertainment and an inquiry...

"Hamlet" as told from the worm's-eye view of the bewildered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor characters in Shakespeare's play.

Shakespeare's popular comedy of love and mistaken identity is accompanied by a section on reading Shakespeare's language, information on Shakespeare's life and theater, explanatory notes, annotated reading lists, and an essay.

In this philosophical fantasy, naive Candide sees and suffers such misfortune that he ultimately rejects the philosophy of his tutor Doctor Pangloss, who claims that "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds." Candide and his companions--Pangloss, his beloved Cunegonde, and his servant Cacambo--display an instinct for survival that provides them hope in an otherwise somber setting. When they all retire together to a simple life on a...

Jack Worthington is an upstanding gentleman in Victorian society. He just has one secret-he tells everyone that he has a brother named Earnest, when, in reality, Earnest is his alter ego. This allows him a certain duality; he can go out and party as Earnest, but have a sterling reputation as Jack. However, he must merge the two when Jack discovers that his lover, Gwendolyn, will only marry a man named Earnest. Meanwhile, Algernon, a family friend,...

The Seagull is the first of Anton Checkov's four full-length plays. It explores the romantic and artistic tension in the relationships between a young woman, a fading older lady, her playwright son and a popular story writer. The play references Shakespeare's Hamlet both in text and content. It has a cast of eclectic characters whose principle dramas play themselves out off stage and in unvoiced subtext. As this opposed the melodramatic

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"The majority is never right…Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools?" – Henrik Ibsen Widely regarded as one of the foremost dramatists of the nineteenth century, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), created realistic plays bringing the social problems of his day to center stage. His dramas portrayed psychological conflict that emphasized character over devious...