Frank Carlson Library

Henry VIII - William Shakespeare - King Henry VIII has one of the fullest theatrical histories of any play in the Shakespeare canon, yet has been consistently misrepresented, both in performance and in criticism. This edition offers a new perspective on this ironic, multi-layered, collaborative play, revealing it as a complex meditation on the progress of Reformation which sees English life since Henry VIII's day as a series of bewildering changes...

The Bard, William Shakespeare, is the supreme talent of playwriting and perhaps also of those 14 lines of verse we call the Sonnet.

The Elizabethan Sonnet Cycle was a popular form for poets in the 16th Century with masterful works by many including Sir Phillip Sidney Edmund Spenser and Michael Drayton. Many others wrote sonnets interspersed amongst their other works such as John Donne and even Queen Elizabeth herself.

But ranking above all

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One of William Shakespeare's most farcical comedies, "The Comedy of Errors" is notable for its use of mistaken identity to achieve a slapstick comedic effect. Ripe with the bard's characteristic word play, the comedy concerns the lives of two sets of identical twins that were accidentally separated shortly after their birth. The play begins by the elderly Syracusian trader Egeon relating the back-story of his family. When Egeon was young, he married...

A drama of two young lovers whose ill-starred passion and tragic e3nd have enthralled countless lovers, as well as readers and audiences all over the world.