William Shakespeare

Tillie Olsen in 1978 pointed out a striking anticipation here of Woolf 's A Room of One's Own: what of the possible Shakespeares we might have had who passed their life from youth upward...

She insists on admiring the presumed simplicity of manners in the Homeric age in preference to modern, civilized, sophisticated society. Her key image for Homer 's style—of wild, luxuriant, varied growth, the opposite of a...

For this production she made some cuts, and revised the catastrophe or plot-resolution. She later said this was the only one of her plays that she would dignify by the name of tragedy.

The arborist re-reads Oliver Twist alongside their partner's lectures and urges the partner to consider discussing the musical form of the novel (a request accommodated, as the academic threads it in alongside Auld Lang Syne...

This book makes some pretence of being an early text, though the way that Nicholas Moldwarp is named and introduced suggests the superior eye of posterity. Manning once again imitates not only early spelling, but...

An odd couple on holiday from England (Stanley Williams, his Jamaican immigrant parents' my-son-the-banker, and Jessie O'Donnell, a singer, a foundling raised by nuns in Leeds) drive haphazardly across Europe towards the Middle East...

EJS is wary of the transformations of poetry: this apparition / A rainbow truth altering for every eye. The real King Richard II , who died in obscurity after a life of ruin and negation...

The play is a Senecan tragedy, written for the closet, not the public stage, though it is worth remembering that upper-class circles reading or performing such plays were connoisseurs of the highly dramatised masque...

The canonical name of Shakespeare was sufficient warrant to offer children stories which did not reliably reward virtue and punish vice, or make clear what action ought to be taken in response to events on...

The title poem celebrates the time of winter solstice and red berries variously identified in several traditions with shed blood. The poems are often touched with darkness and strangeness: with the sun turning black as...

EN does not come clean here about the complicated sexual and genealogical relationships in her family, but she gives a sensitive account of her own development and attitudes as a writer. It is here that...

The plot of this novel is a version of a romance archetype: poor but deserving girl confounds all expectations by marrying up. Elizabeth Bennet is the quintessence of the witty and resourceful heroine who had...

Mary addressed herself particularly to female readers, because she knew that access to Shakespeare in the original was likely to be harder for girls than for boys. Sarah Burton argues that she had a hidden...

Turning from history to literature, EPL notes that whereas in life women are assumed to be weak, in literature they are depicted as and admired for being strong, wilful, and assertive. The only exception she...

MD centred her story on a woman whose life is drifting, who has plenty of leisure but no direction. The idea came to her when she herself was bustling around London on her short visits...