What a Piece of Work Is Man!


Book Description

Dramatist Yvette Heyliger delivers power-packed full-length plays for leading women, each prefaced by an artistic statement. Her instincts for comic relief are genius." Backstage West "Heyliger has a solid flair for dialogue and a good ear for comedy." Park LaBrea News Bridge to Baraka (Excerpt) Yvette X appeared in a dashiki and huge Afro to bring the 60s Black Arts Movement to the present womens struggle in her side-splitting and astute Bridge to Baraka. The Dramatist White House Wives: Operation Lysistrata! Playwright Yvette Heyliger, herself African American and female (a combination not seen enough in American theatre, particularly when commenting on the nations political landscape) takes advantage of her position and writes dialogue that brings her unique perspective to light. Theatre is Easy Hillary and Monica: The Winter of Her Discontent It's more absurd than any Saturday Night Live sketch on the same subject, but it has more to say about ambition and the reasons behind one's actions than your average comedy routine... you'll end up having a hearty laugh. NYTheatre.com What Would Jesus Do? "Talk about great plays, this powerful drama depicting AIDS and its cover-up is as important as those Larry Kramer plays in the early stages of the dreaded scourge. Listen up theatre producers, this play should make it to Broadway, where it belongs." Celebrity Society Fathers Day A profound psychological drama with hard-hitting, solid characters and realistic dialogue; a tour de force for directors and actors The BCS Experience, GoProRadio Homegirl "A fresh and vivid comedy that connects the political to the personal, American history to Roanetta's story with a light touch and a warm heart." Los Angeles Times




Hamlet


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Voice and Context in Eighteenth-Century Verse


Book Description

This collection of essays reassesses the importance of verse as a medium in the long eighteenth century, and as an invitation for readers to explore many of the less familiar figures dealt with, alongside the received names of the standard criticism of the period.




As You Like it


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Hamlet


Book Description

This Arden edition of Hamlet, arguably Shakespeare's greatest tragedy, presents an authoritative, modernized text based on the Second Quarto text with a new introductory essay covering key productions and criticism in the decade since its first publication. A timely up-date in the 400th anniversary year of Shakespeare's death which will ensure the Arden edition continues to offer students a comprehensive and current critical account of the play, alongside the most reliable and fully-annotated text available.




The Seven Ages of Man


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Studies in Shakespeare


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All's Well That Ends Well Annotated


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Set in France and Italy, All's Well That Ends Well is a story of one-sided romance, based on a tale from Boccaccio's The Decameron. Helen, orphaned daughter of a doctor, is under the protection of the widowed Countess of Rossillion. In love with Bertram, the countess' son, Helen follows him to court, where she cures the sick French king of an apparently fatal illness. The king rewards Helen by offering her the husband of her choice. She names Bertram; he resists. When forced by the king to marry her, he refuses to sleep with her and, accompanied by the braggart Parolles, leaves for the Italian wars. He says that he will only accept Helen if she obtains a ring from his finger and becomes pregnant with his child. She goes to Italy disguised as a pilgrim and suggests a 'bed trick' whereby she will take the place of Diana, a widow's daughter whom Bertram is trying to seduce. A 'kidnapping trick' humiliates the boastful Parolles, whilst the bed trick enables Helen to fulfil Bertram's conditions, leaving him no option but to marry her, to his mother's delight.




Hamlet on the Couch


Book Description

Hamlet on the Couch weaves a close reading of Shakespeare's Hamlet with a large variety of contemporary psychoanalytic and psychological theory, looking at the interplay of ideas between the two. Combining deep, insightful knowledge of Shakespeare and of psychoanalysis, Hamlet on the Couch will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as literary scholars.




What a Piece of Work


Book Description

This is a small book on a large subject: What is special about human beings? Hamlet mused, ‘What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how like a god!' but went on to speak of ‘this quintessence of dust'. Helen Oppenheimer prefers to start with the dust and move to the glory: we really are animals — and from these animals has come Shakespeare. People are indeed ‘miserable sinners’ — and also magnificent creatures. The author does not disguise that she is a Christian theologian whose subject is ethics, but she writes equally for non-Christians. Her invitation to the reader is: Here is a way of looking at things that I find exciting and convincing — I hope you do too.