Louis B. Wright

Each edition includes: - Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play - Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play - Scene-by-scene plot summaries - A key to famous lines and phrases - An introduction to reading Shakespeare's language - An essay by an outstanding scholar providing a modern perspective on the play - Illustrations from the Folger Shakespeare Library's vast holdings of rare...

Sir John Falstaff, knowing that Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page control the money in their respective households, decides to seduce them, but they learn of his scheme and resolve to make a fool of him. A comic series of disguises and misadventures follows.

Presents a collection of 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets and includes detailed notes on the sonnets and an overview of Shakespeare's life and literary impact.

"A lively, colorful account of the adventures of Spanish, Portuguese, and English explorers emphasizes their diverse and seemingly contradictory motives." -- In the late fifteenth century Europe was astir with dreams of discovery that would shortly transform the world. It was an age of intense intellectual curiosity, of questioning, testing, and the balancing of conflicting motivations. The author, a distinguished Renaissance historian, has sorted...

A discussion of the sources and historical background of the play accompanies the text and critical commentaries.

Shakespeare may have written Julius Caesar as the first of his plays to be performed at the Globe, in 1599. For it, he turned to a key event in Roman history: Caesar's death at the hands of friends and fellow politicians. Renaissance writers disagreed over the assassination, seeing Brutus, a leading conspirator, as either hero or villain. Shakespeare's play keeps this debate alive.

Discusses the unique and difficult life in America's frontier towns as the frontier expanded westward from colonial Virginia toCalifornia and back to Nebraska.