Publisher: Merkaba Press
The Alchemist is a comedy by English playwright Ben Jonson. First performed in 1610 by the King's Men, it is generally considered Jonson's best and most characteristic comedy.
The NHB Drama Classics series presents the world's greatest plays in affordable, highly readable editions for students, actors and theatregoers. The hallmarks of the series are accessible introductions (focussing on the play's theatrical and historical background, together with an author biography, key dates and suggestions for further reading) and the complete text, uncluttered with footnotes. The translations, by leading experts in the field, are accurate and above all actable. The editions of English-language plays include a glossary of unusual words and phrases to aid understanding. Woyzeck is one of the most performed and influential plays in German theatre. A modern classic that remains frighteningly relevant today. Franz Woyzeck, a lowly soldier stationed in a provincial German town, is bullied by his superiors and starved by the regiment's doctor in the name of scientific experiment. His only pleasures in life are his lover Marie and their innocent young son. But when Woyzeck learns that Marie has been unfaithful with the regiment's handsome Drum Major, he murders his lover in a fit of rage and hopelessness. Based on a real-life murder trial that took place in Germany in the 1820s, the play was written in 1837 but not staged until 1913. This edition, translated by Gregory Motton, includes an introduction by Kenneth McLeish, a chronology and suggestions for further reading.Show book
Francesco Petrarch's Canzoniere (translated in English as 'Scattered Rhymes') is a collection of 14th century poems famed for their deep exploration of love, grief, spirituality and nature. Written over the course of forty years (approximately between 1328-1368), this collection includes 317 sonnets, 29 canzoni, 9 sestine, 4 madrigals and 7 ballate. These Scattered Rhymes almost always return to Laura, a women who Petrarch loves deeply, whom he first saw on a Good Friday. On this same day, some years later, Laura died. But Petrarch's love does not wane, in fact at points it burns brighter. Il Canzoniere also serves as a valuable contemporary insight into 14th century religion and the role of the papacy in Christendom. Petrarch's work is one of civilization's most immaculate achievements. Michael R. G. Spiller regards Il Canzoniere as 'the single greatest inspiration for the love poetry of Renaissance Europe until well into the seventeenth century'. Following his acclaimed translation of Dante's Inferno, which 'immediately joins ranks with the very best available in English' (Dr Richard Lansing), Peter Thornton brings the poetry of Petrarch to the 21st Century in direct and luminous verse. Here's a madrigal, number 52 in the sequence. 52 However much Diana may have pleasedthe lover who by like chance spied her bareamid the frigid water, I no less delighted in the shy hill shepherdesswashing a wisp of veil to keep her hair,glinting with gold, protected from the breeze. And even now, when the sky burns above,she makes me shiver with a chill of love.Show book
Aspects Of Love is an anthology of poetic explorations on the theme of erotic love - though one of the "poets" represented here is better known, even than as a dramatist, as the philosopher, Plato. His Symposium heads off this set of erotic explorations. In The Symposium's philosophic play, he depicts a scene of men cosing together over dinner, each describing what he finds in his experience of love. I have followed this pattern in the choice of works for this anthology - in a similar manner, each of these works deals in a radically different way with the discovery of love. Whether philandering or married, heterosexual, lesbian or gay, under cover of friendship or as flagrant delight, from Plato through Donne, Whitman, Shakespeare or Sappho. we will not cease from exploration till we reach at last, as The Symposium does, a vision of the union of love as a discovery of the Divine. Surely there must be something here for everyone.Show book
LibriVox’s Short Poetry Collection 051: a collection of 20 public-domain poems.Show book
This is a small volume with short poems about flowers. Listeners may wish to refer to the online text, which includes very neat illustrations. - Summary by CarolinShow book
Henry Lawson was an Australian writer and poet. Along with his contemporary Banjo Paterson, Lawson is among the best-known Australian poets and fiction writers of the colonial period and is often called Australia's "greatest short story writer". (Summary by Wikipedia )Show book
