Plays & Poetry Books

Over 150 exquisite poems deal with love, friendship, the tyranny of time, beauty's evanescence, death, and other themes in language unsurpassed in passion, precision, originality, and beauty. This inexpensive Dover edition enables any lover of poetry or fine literature to have this remarkable verse in his or her library. Includes glossary of archaic terms.

One of the best-known, most frequently performed of modern plays, displaying Ibsen's genius for realistic prose drama. A classic expression of women's rights, the play builds to a climax in which the central character, Nora, rejects a smothering marriage and life in "a doll’s house."

Witty and buoyant comedy of manners is brilliantly plotted from its effervescent first act to its hilarious denouement, and filled with some of literature's most famous epigrams. Widely considered Wilde's most perfect work, the play is reprinted here from an authoritative early British edition.

Since it was first performed in Athens in the 420s BC, Oedipus the King has been widely regarded as Sophocles' greatest tragedy and one of the foundation stones of western drama. Taken as a model by Aristotle in his Poetics, it became a yardstick for future generations.

Two classics of English poetry, alternately describing childhood states of innocence and their inevitable corruption by a harsh and unjust world. Contains the full texts of all the poems in the original 1794 edition of both collections

Among the most popular of all Shakespeare's comedies, this play humorously celebrates the vagaries of love. With its several pairs of lovers, on-again, off-again romances, magic spells, fairies, and a bumbling troupe of would-be actors, the play continues to enchant audiences. Unabridged reprint of an authoritative British edition, complete with explanatory footnotes.

Popular, well-known poetry: "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" "Death, be not proud," "The Raven," "The Road Not Taken," plus works by Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, Emerson, Browning, Keats, Kipling, Sandburg, Pound, Auden, Thomas, and many others.

This edition of Lear's work contains all the verse and stories of "The Book of Nonsense", "More Nonsense", "Nonsense Songs", "Nonsense Stories and Nonsense Alphabets" and "Nonsense Cookery".
Includes: The Owl and The Pussy-Cat, The Jumblies, Calico Pie, The Pobble who had no Toes and many many more.

This edition combines some of Christina Rossetti's sonnets, ballads and shorter lyrics with the narrative fable Goblin Market.

Two dramas set among the folk of the Aran Islands and western Irish coastlands. The Playboy of the Western World deals with a hero's progress, from timid weakling to paragon of bravery. Riders to the Sea is an elegy to those who live at the mercy of the sea. Includes Synge's preface to The Playboy of the Western World.

Features 41 of Poe's most memorable poems among them "The Bells," "Ulalume," "Israfel," "To Helen," "The Conqueror Worm," "Eldorado" and "Annabel Lee" reveal the extraordinary spectrum of Poe's personality and his virtuoso command of poetic language, rhythms and figures of speech.

Rich selection of 73 works by the English "metaphysical" poet. Included are "The Good Morrow," "The Canonization," "The Relic," "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," "To His Mistress Going to Bed," "Death Be Not Proud," "Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward," "Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness" and many more.

Treasury of 30 works, including such favorites as "On first looking into Chapman's Homer," "The Eve of St. Agnes," "On seeing the Elgin Marbles," "La Belle Dame sans Merci," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "To Autumn," and 23 more. Reprinted from a standard text.

Final play in Shakespeare's masterly dramatization of the struggle for power between the Houses of York and Lancaster. Richard is a stunning archvillain who schemes, seduces, betrays and murders his way to the throne, yet is capable of eliciting sympathy for his plight at the end. Explanatory footnotes and an introductory Note.

This dark psychological drama was first produced in Norway in 1890 and depicts the evil machinations of a ruthless, nihilistic heroine: the infamous Hedda Gabler. Readers will discover a masterly exploration of the nature of evil, along with the potential for tragedy that lies in human frailty. A true masterpiece.

Treasury of over 150 familiar poems by English and American poets, including a selection of Shakespeare's sonnets, John Donne's "The Ecstasy," William Blake's "The Garden of Love," as well as works by W. B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Whitman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Keats, Milton, Robert Frost and many more.

One of the greatest classics of modern theater, the fateful drama of a willful young aristocrat's seduction of her father's valet during a Midsummer's Eve celebration. Inspired by the new ideas of naturalism and psychology that swept Europe in the late 19th century, the play is reprinted here complete with Strindberg's critical preface.

Treasury of 39 works by influential English Romantic poet: "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," the "Lucy" poems, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," many more — all reprinted from an authoritative edition. Alphabetical lists of titles and first lines.

"The Taming of the Shrew" is one of the most famous and controversial of Shakespeare's comedies. The central relationship, in which Petruchio boisterously 'tames' a rebellious Kate, has often appeared problematic. In the theatre, it has been treated in a diversity of ways, so that Kate's apparent capitulation varies between the ironic and the sincere. Feminists have been divided in their responses.

"Much Ado About Nothing" has long been celebrated as one of Shakespeare's most popular comedies. The central relationship, between Benedick and Beatrice, is wittily combative until love prevails. Broader comedy is provided by Dogberry, Verges and the watchmen.

"Macbeth" is one of Shakespeare's four great tragedies, encompassing witchcraft, bloody murder, ghostly apparitions as well as high poetry, blended in such a way as to demonstrate the assured dramatic touch of Shakespeare's maturity.

The gentle melancholy and lyrical atmosphere of "Twelfth Night" have long made the play a favourite with Shakespearian audiences. The plot revolves around mistaken identities and unrequited love, but is further enlivened by a comic sub-plot of considerable accomplishment.
In it, Sir Toby Belch and his companion outwit the pretentious Malvolio, who despite suffering their most outrageous and insulting practical jokes, emerges as an almost noble figure.

Hamlet is not only one of Shakespeare's greatest plays, but also the most fascinatingly problematical tragedy in world literature. First performed around 1600, this a gripping and exuberant drama of revenge, rich in contrasts and conflicts. Its violence alternates with introspection, its melancholy with humour, and its subtlety with spectacle. The Prince, Hamlet himself, is depicted as a complex, divided, introspective character. His reflections on death, morality and the very status of human beings make him the first modern man .

"King Lear" has been widely acclaimed as Shakespeare's most powerful tragedy. Elemental and passionate, it encompasses the horrific and the heart-rending. Love and hate, loyalty and treachery, cruelty and self-sacrifice: all these contend in a tempestuous drama which has become an enduring classic of the world's literature.

The textual editing endeavours to take account of recent scholarship while giving the material a careful reappraisal. About this book: Love, sex and death are the components of Shakespeare's classic story of the love of two young people which reaches across the barriers of family and convention.It encompasses great love, high drama, low comedy and a tragic ending. Romeo and Juliet is a pure tragedy of youth told in verse that is both youthful and intense.

"Julius Caesar" is among the best of Shakespeare's historical and political plays. Dealing with events surrounding the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., the drama vividly illustrates the ways in which power and corruption are linked. The cry 'Peace, freedom and liberty!' is used to exculpate brutal realities, while personal ambitions taint public actions. Rich in characterization and replete with eloquent rhetoric, "Julius Caesar" remains engrossing and topical: a play for today.

Promised a golden future as ruler of Scotland by three sinister witches, Macbeth murders the king to ensure his ambitions come true. But he soon learns the meaning of terror - killing once, he must kill again and again, and the dead return to haunt him. A story of war, witchcraft and bloodshed, Macbeth also depicts the relationship between husbands and wives, and the risks they are prepared to take to achieve their desires.

Great title poem plus "Kubla Khan," "Christabel," 20 other sonnets, lyrics, odes: "Sonnet: To a Friend who asked how I felt when the Nurse first presented my Infant to me," "Frost at Midnight," "The Nightingale," "The Pains of Sleep," "To William Wordsworth," "Youth and Age," many more.

Authoritative edition of one of the enduring classics of English poetry 63 poems on the nature of friendship, the passing of youth, the vanity of dreams, other human concerns. Long prized by literary scholars for their perfection of form and feeling, and loved by generations of readers for simplicity, sensitivity, direct emotional appeal.