Shakespeare's Plays

Everybody’s Shakespeare brings the insights and wisdom of one of the finest Shakespearean scholars of our century to the task of surveying why the Bard continues to flourish in modern times. Mack treats individually seven plays—Hamlet, King Lear,nbsp;Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Cesar, and Antony and Cleopatra—and demonstrates in each case how the play has retained its vitality, complexity, and appeal.

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is the culmination of Harold Bloom's life's work in reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare. It is his passionate and convincing analysis of the way in which Shakespeare not merely represented human nature as we know it today, but actually created it: before Shakespeare, there was characterization; after Shakespeare, there was character, men and women with highly individual personalities -- Hamlet, Falstaff, Iago, Cleopatra, Macbeth, Rosalind, and Lear, among them. In making his argument, Bloom leads us through a brilliant and comprehensive reading of every one of Shakespeare's plays. According to a New York Times report on Shakespeare last year, "more people are watching him, reading him, and studying him than ever before". Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is a landmark contribution, a book that will be celebrated and read for many years to come. It explains why Shakespeare has remained our most popular playwright for more than four hundred years, and in helping us to understand ourselves through literature, it restores the role of critic to one of central importance to our culture.

Provides in-depth commentary on characters, themes, and the historical and social context of 300 most-studied literary works, including novels, plays, poems, speeches, and short stories, both international and American.

Collection of essays by Shakespeare scholars that have been selected for students at the high school or undergraduate college level. Each entry includes an introduction; a plot synopsis; a character list; a discussion of the work's principal themes; information about the style and literary devices used; a conversation about the work's historical context; and a critical overview.