When Prince Oroonoko's passion for the virtuous Imoinda arouses the jealousy of his grandfather, the lovers are cast into slavery and transported from Africa to the colony of Surinam. Oroonoko's noble…
Eliza Haywood (1693-1756) (born Elizabeth Fowler) was an English writer, actress and publisher. Since the 1980s, Eliza Haywood's literary works have been gaining in recognition and interest. She wrote…
"The Rover" or "The Banish'd Cavaliers" is a play in two parts that is written by the English author Aphra Behn. It is a revision of Thomas Killigrew's play "Thomaso", or "The Wanderer" (1664), and fe…
Bitter, satiric comedy in blank verse is one of the great Elizabethan dramatist’s finest plays. The plot concerns a wealthy, lecherous old man who feigns a mortal illness in order to solicit bribes fr…
The Rape of Lucrece is a 1594 narrative poem. In 509 BC Lucretia was raped by the son of Tarquin the King of Rome. Lucretia was the wife of a Roman aristocrat. She committed suicide and her body was p…
Pericles tells of a prince who risks his life to win a princess, but discovers that she is in an incestuous relationship with her father and flees to safety. He marries another princess, but she dies …
The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, commonly referred to simply as Doctor Faustus, is an Elizabethan tragedy by Christopher Marlowe, based on German stories about the title c…
In his most famous and controversial book, Utopia, Thomas More imagines a perfect island nation where thousands live in peace and harmony, men and women are both educated, and all property is communal…
More widely studied and more frequently performed than ever before, John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi is here presented in an accessible and thoroughly up-to-date edition.
First published in 1613, The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry is probably the first play in English known to have been authored by a woman, and it has become increasingly popular in the stud…
Readers and audiences have long greeted As You Like It with delight. Its characters are brilliant conversationalists, including the princesses Rosalind and Celia and their Fool, Touchstone. Soon after…
Written in 1595, Richard II occupies a significant place in the Shakespeare canon, marking the transition from the earlier history plays dominated by civil war and stark power to a more nuanced repres…
Titus Andronicus is one of Shakespeare's earliest and bloodiest tragedies and was hugely successful in his lifetime. Subsequent generations have struggled with its bold confrontation of violence but i…
