Showing titles in Shakespeare

The multi-award winning SmartPass full-cast, unabridged performance with comprehensive commentary and analysis for any student to fully understand and appreciate the play.

This production of Hamlet, directed by Sir John Gielgud and starring Richard Burton, was recorded in the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, and with the actors performing just as they would if you went to see a production tonight. "The particular intensity and nerves of this is probably the same kind of thing that excites an audience in live theater," says Richard Burton.

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's notorious portrait of a weak king in thrall to his passions, who pays the ultimate price for choosing his heart over his political responsibilities. Originally broadcast 13 September 2009 in the ‘Drama on 3’ slot. Edward...

Falstaff is both a comic and tragic central protagonist in Shakespeare's three Henry plays. He is companion to Prince Hal (the future Henry V), who loves him, goads him, teases him, indulges his vast appetites, and commits all sorts of mischief with him. Award-winning author and esteemed professor Harold Bloom examines Falstaff with the deepest compassion and sympathy and also with unerring wisdom. He uses the relationship between Falstaff and Hal to explore the devastation of severed bonds and the heartbreak of betrayal.  

In this BBC full-cast production, Julius Caesar is triumphant after his victory over the sons of Pompey. But as bad omens and weather plague Rome, even his most loyal friends are starting to see the signs... Political intrigue and fierce battle rage in this tense and dynamic production in which...

The young and virtuous physician's daughter Helena desperately loves Count Bertram, but he regards her as beneath his notice. When Helena cures the king of France of a mortal illness, he rewards her with Bertram's hand, but before their marriage can be consummated the count flees. To win her husband back again, Helena forms a daring and resourceful plan. A plot to unmask the strutting soldier Parolles makes up another strand in this sometimes disturbing comedy of deception and disguise.

Shakespeare and Cognition challenges orthodox approaches to Shakespeare by using recent psychological findings about human decision-making to analyze the unique characters that populate his plays.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre, undergoes a tyrant's fury, storm, and shipwreck. He wins love and suffers loss, but what is lost may also be found. With the ancient poet Gower acting as narrator, we follow the adventures of Pericles from young manhood to maturity. This strange and powerful tale of loss and recovery is the first in the group of romance comedies created by Shakespeare at the end of his dramatic career.

‘Who is this guy, Dad? What is he doing here?’ With an absent wife and a daughter going off the rails, wealthy art collector and philanthropist Simon Strulovitch is in need of someone to talk to. So when he meets Shylock at a cemetery in Cheshire’s Golden Triangle, he invites him back to...

Many of Shakespeare's greatest and best-loved speeches are brought together in this superb collection, performed by outstanding artists who bring to vivid life words which are an integral part of our language, our culture and our everyday lives.

In this BBC full-cast production, King Lear tests his three daughters' love, with disastrous consequences. Some of the most stirring scenes Shakespeare ever wrote resonate powerfully in this dramatic radio production. Tortured madness, pure evil, and the fatal struggle for power grip the...

When a young woman is offered the choice ofsaving a man's life at the price of her own chastity,what should she do? The political and moral corruption of Vienna has driven Duke Vincentio into hiding while his deputy governor, Angelo is left to revive the old discipline of civic authority...

In this BBC full-cast production of The Taming of the Shrew, the freedom and virility of women is frowned upon. Will Petruchio's quest to 'tame' his new wife succeed? Layers of assumed identity, elaborate role-playing, and acerbic exchanges of wit reveal the real relationship between men and...

Bloomsbury presents Julius Caesar and Me, written and read by Paterson Joseph. 'Julius Caesar is, simply, Shakespeare's African play' John Kani In 2012, actor Paterson Joseph played the role of Brutus in the Royal Shakespeare Company's acclaimed production of Julius Caesar - Gregory Doran's last...

Twelfth Night, nowadays one of Shakespeare's best-loved and most-admired comedies, was not always so regarded: Samuel Pepys saw the play three times in the 1660s and judged it 'silly'. Modern audiences, critics, and directors seem better attuned to its delicate counter pointing of romance and realism....

Coriolanus is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1605 and 1608. Coriolanus is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1605 and 1608. The play is based on the life of the legendary Roman leader, Gaius Marcius Coriolanus...

By the time Shakespeare came to write Macbeth - almost certainly in 1605/1606 - he had already completed three of the great tragedies with which modern audiences are so familiar: Hamlet (1601), Othello (1603), and King Lear (1605). Each of those plays gives us an eponymous hero who is in some significant way flawed, but for whom we also inevitably feel deep sympathy, whatever his errors or crimes. But in MacBeth, Shakespeare has chosen for his tragic hero a man guilty of the most terrible crime imaginable to a Jacobean audience, that of regicide - the murder of a king.

This widely studied play is one of the "best sellers" of the Shakespeare canon. This production is the sixth Shakespeare play in the series undertaken by Naxos AudioBooks in conjunction with Cambridge University Press.

Experience Julius Caesar as a powerful full-cast drama with entertaining and enlightening commentary that explains what's what and who's who as the plot unfolds. To help you get the most out of Shakespeare, the narrator offers historical insights and background information, so you can enjoy the jokes, appreciate the references, and get a real sense of Shakespeare's world.

Renowned Shakespearean actors John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson lead a full-cast performance of this beloved Shakespeare play. Dealing with issues of mercy, justice, and truth, and their relationship to pride and humility, this is Shakespeare at his most complex and rewarding.