Maison d'édition: Charles River Editors
A Woman of No Importance by famed Irish playwright Oscar Wilde, premiered in 1893. Heraklion Press has included a linked table of contents to navigate the four acts.
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. The Country Wife is a classically bawdy Restoration Comedy. 1675. The aptly named Horner is pretending to be a eunuch in order to gain access to women under their husbands' noses. Pinchwife has recently married an innocent country girl, who immediately falls for Horner. Pinchwife's plans to stop any liaison go badly awry. Meanwhile Horner is giving pleasure to assorted other wives. All ends happily with Pinchwife - and the other husbands - convinced of Horner's impotence...Voir livre
Probably written in the latter half of the 14th century in the South-West-Midlands dialect, Piers Plowman is a remarkable example of allegorical, alliterative verse that conveyed, for the first time ever, the authentic voice, spirit and character of the ordinary people of England. Very little is known about William Langland, the presumed author, but it is very much a product of the medieval mind combining Christian belief with dramatic poetry in a drama of identity. While the characters are less rounded, more-two dimensional than the fully developed protagonists of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, they comprise an illuminating sample of the English type: the ‘every-men' and women of their time, from the plowman to the wastrel, the merchant to the priest, the high-born lady to the harlot. No-one is spared. Opening with a dream, or vision, a structural device made popular by the 13th-century French poet Guillaume de Loris in his Roman de la Rose and used most successfully by Dante in his Divine Comedy, Langland proceeds to explore his theme: namely, the world and the path the true Christian must follow through it to achieve salvation in life. In the course of the events which he goes on to describe, in a series of visions and successive awakenings, he paints a wonderfully detailed and highly critical picture of the corruption and abuses in the church and in society. Concepts become characters in the drama of life; Reason, Conscience, Recompense, Wealth, Will, Desire, “All the world's weal, all the world's woe,” are examined metaphorically in the context of the changing realities of the medieval economy. Piers Plowman embodies the Will. He is the good Christian who carries Jesus Christ in his heart, a good person who works hard for the benefit of the community and his own soul. His attitudes and actions are in counterpoint to those of a whole range of less edifying characters: ne'er-do-wells, layabouts, good-for-nothings, lollers and grafters, corrupt clergy, friars, pardoners, summoners, beer-watering publicans, brothel keepers, liars, robbers and cheats. The poem is remarkable for the way in which it comprises a range of modes and genres, from sermonising and psychomachia to biblical history and satires on social status, flowing effortlessly, almost seamlessly, from one to the other. It holds the mirror up to medieval society and it does not flatter. It is by turns both prophetic and apocalyptic, reflecting multiple facets of the Christian imagination. The series of visions revealed to the listener can be seen as didactic processes, or steps on the spiritual journey to salvation and include the shriving of the Seven Deadly Sins and the Vision of Antichrist. This version also contains a marvellously vivid description of the Harrowing of Hell, which prefigures the infernal imagery recreated 300 years later in John Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost. This rendering of Piers Plowman in modern English by Arthur Burrell comes to life as never before in this lively, nuanced recording performed by Mike Rogers.Voir livre
Looking back is often like looking in a mirror, all the imperfections are obvious. This is the journey of how two women look back saw their past reflections and use them to do good. How they managed to smooth out the path ahead. How they reconcile themselves with who they are and who they will be. Every path has a crossroad and finding the peace to be satisfied with the choices is part of every journey.Voir livre
A new collection of poems by this award-winning author will take your breath away with the emotions portraying love and loss, sadness and joy. Connect with her words and celebrate life and acknowledge the loss as the author takes you on a journey through her emotions in a most beautiful way – with her carefully chosen words. Her undeniable talent, her beautiful words, the loss she reflects on, will all make you feel her emotions deeply, as they resonate with yours.Voir livre
Stranger in the Mask of a Deer conjures an elemental, dreamlike narrative ranging from the present to the Late-Upper Palaeolithic, when the British peninsula was gradually reoccupied by humans and animals returning from the greater continent after the Ice Age. Richard Skelton began this book-length poem many years ago with the intention of exploring the history of Britain's landscape, only for the text to transform into a kind of literary seance, involving both human and other-than-human voices. Its transforming power lies in the accumulative magic of the word as ritual. Skelton's is a mesmeric lyric, probing the edges of consciousness towards a place where 'there are always presences / always inherences / things beyond sight.' 'An incredibly moving, essential meditation on where we have come from, where we are, and where we are headed.' Kerri ní DochartaighVoir livre
Spoon RiverSpoon River has 244 accounts of the lives of people in the town that explain its goings on over a couple of centuries. Each free form verse is presented as an epitaph of one of the citizens delivered themselves, often criticizing the words said about them on their tombstone or the monument or stone left above them. The stories build on one another as well as reference various family members and others mentioned in other stories. Sherwood Anderson does a similar thing in Winesburg, Ohio where major characters in their own right become bit players in other people's narratives. It reminds one of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead where Hamlet is only a bit player in their lives. The interplay between successful and unsuccessful, those who think they are high born, as one successful man thought, but was actually the illegitimate child of an old woman who never got to nurture her own successful child. These interplays move the story forward as well as our hearts in reading them. Keywords: Spoon River, Ann Rutledge, Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio.Voir livre
