Shakespeare shines a fierce spotlight on the jealous heart and on our attitudes toward the outsider. A story of its time and for our time, full of terror and beauty, Othello is urgent, gripping, radical, and beautiful.
Under the editorial supervision of Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, two of today's most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, this Modern Library series incorporates definitive texts and authoritative notes from William Shakespeare: Complete Works. Each play includes an Introduction as well as an overview of Shakespeare's theatrical career; commentary on past and...

Shakespeare became famous as a dazzling poet before most people even knew that he wrote plays. His sonnets are the English language's most extraordinary anatomy of love in all its dimensions-desire and despair, longing and loss, adoration and disgust. To read them is to confront morality and eternity in the same breath. Produced under the editorial supervision of Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, two of today's most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, The Sonnets and Other Poems includes all of Shakespeare's sonnets, the long narrative poems "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of...

Published in 1896, "The Damnation of Theron Ware or Illumination" is a profound psychological portrait of the spiritual undoing of a guileless Methodist minister who is taken in by a rural townspeople s various progressive ideas, from liberalism to bohemianism, only to be spurned by them for being too conventional. Described by Everett Carter as among the four or five best novels written by an American during the nineteenth century, the novel, as Joyce Carol Oates writes in her Introduction, has shrewd, disturbing insights into the human pysche.
This Modern Library Paperback Classic is...

The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a novel that is itself the subject of one of literature's most enduring mysteries. The story recounts the troubled romance of Rosa Bud and the book's eponymous character, who later vanishes. Was Drood murdered, and if so by whom? All clues point to John Jasper, Drood's lugubrious uncle, who coveted Rosa. Or did Drood orchestrate his own disappearance? As Charles Dickens died before finishing the book, the ending is intriguingly ambiguous.
In his Introduction, Matthew Pearl illuminates the 150-year-long quest to unravel The Mystery of Edwin Drood...

With his family's claim to the throne uncertain, Henry seeks to secure his position by turning the country's attention abroad. But when his outnumbered army is trapped at Agincourt, disaster seems inevitable. Shakespeare probes notions of leadership and power in this iconic depiction of England's charismatic warrior king.

Under the editorial supervision of Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, two of today's most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, this Modern Library series incorporates definitive texts and authoritative notes from William Shakespeare: Complete Works. Each play includes an...

Eminent Shakespearean scholars Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen provide a fresh new edition of this powerful play that explores sexual hypocrisy and questions morality at all levels of society. This volume also includes more than a hundred pages of exclusive features, including:
- an original Introduction to Measure for Measure
- incisive scene-by-scene synopsis and analysis with vital facts about the work
- commentary on past and current productions based on interviews with leading directors, actors, and designers
- photographs of key RSC productions
- an overview of...

In Ethics: The Essential Writings, philosopher Gordon Marino skillfully presents an accessible, provocative anthology of both ancient and modern classics on matters moral. The philosophers represent 2,500 years of thought--from Plato, Kant, and Nietzsche to Alasdair MacIntyre, Susan Wolf, and Peter Singer--and cover a broad range of topics, from the timeless questions of justice, morality, and faith to the hot-button concerns of today, such as animal rights, our duties to the environment, and gender issues. Featuring an illuminating preamble, concise introductory essays on the...

Available in English for the first time, Marie Vieux-Chauvet's stunning trilogy of novellas is a remarkable literary event. In a brilliant translation by Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokur, Love, Anger, Madness is a scathing response to the struggles of race, class, and sex that have ruled Haiti. Suppressed upon its initial publication in 1968, this major work became an underground classic and was finally released in an authorized edition in France in 2005.

In Love, Anger, Madness, Marie Vieux-Chauvet offers three slices of life under an oppressive regime. Gradually...

Eminent Shakespearean scholars Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen provide a fresh new edition of this classic tragedy of politics and war, honor and love--along with more than a hundred pages of exclusive features, including:

- an original Introduction to Troilus and Cressida
- incisive scene-by-scene synopsis and analysis with vital facts about the work
- commentary on past and current productions based on interviews with leading directors, actors, and designers
- photographs of key RSC productions
- an overview of Shakespeare's theatrical career and chronology of his plays...

Eminent Shakespearean scholars Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen provide a fresh new edition of Richard II, chronologically the first of the eight plays in Shakespeare's History Cycle, which marks the beginning of a great schism within the nobility of England that will leave the nation riven by bloody conflict for the next hundred years. This volume also includes more than a hundred pages of exclusive features, including:

- an original Introduction to Richard II
- incisive scene-by-scene synopsis and analysis with vital facts about the work
- commentary on past and current...