William Shakespeare

The book's first and longest piece, The History of an Enthusiast, is strongly influenced by Germaine de Staël 's novel Corinne; ou, L'Italie. Protagonist Julia Osborne is an orphan being brought up...

The heroine suffers under not one but two bad mother-figures, neither of whom is her birth mother. It opens with Greville, a country curate whose spirit has been wounded by the vice and deceit of...

As the work opens, Cordelia, slight of body, determined of will, savvy of mind (who is to reappear later in another book, The Skull Beneath the Skin), is running a seedy detective agency...

According to Linden Peach , the writings of Bertolt Brecht and Mikhail Bakhtin influenced AC 's notions of theatre and the carnivalesque, which are central features of Nights at the Circus. However, Peach went...

The title-page quotes are from Nicholas Rowe 's Jane Shore and an unidentified old play. The actual woman behind the story was Rebecca Berry, later Elton . The coat of arms of her...

The language, entirely spare and unadorned, links the play on the one hand to contemporary television reports and on the other to the ancient mode of tragedy. Ian with his eyes put out unaffectedly recalls...

Ragged Banners also addresses questions of genre. The text includes an index which lists on the one hand names of notable literary figures (including Ethel M. Dell , T. S. Eliot , and Shakespeare ...

CG calls Quid Pro Quoa bustling play of the Farquhar , or George Colman school. Her prologue makes the point that the rapidity of modern life, symbolised by the railway, leaves no time...

Reading myths, she finds, she has equal difficulty inhabiting characters of hyper-masculine men and of oppressed women: she wants instead to read about women who love themselves, who are alive, who are not debased, overshadowed...

The title-page quotes Shakespeare on the marriage of true minds. This novel explores various motives for marriage and traces the experience of a group of married couples. It begins with the five Miss Phipson sisters...

This novel, like the others in the trilogy, is set in the fictionalised Norwich: Morningquest. SG opened it with a quotation from Emilia in Shakespeare 's Othello, claiming the right and duty to...

The preface opens by quoting Johnson 's view of Shakespeare as the poet of nature who moved away from the universal reliance of dramatists on romantic love as the only motive for action. What a...

The epigraph is a statement about truth from Shakespeare 's Henry IV Part One. The protagonist of this novel, Sarah Barcant, was born in Smitsrivier, a dusty little South African town dominated by its...

This collection represents a significant departure from AW 's earlier work in its adoption of literary conventions. Peopled with jesters, knights, witches, and shepherdesses, the poems in this volume incorporate historical (Anglo-Saxon and Elizabethan), mythological...

This play provoked Samuel Daniel to respond with The Tragedy of Cleopatra (published in another work in 1594), and influenced Shakespeare 's Antony and Cleopatra. Though apparently never acted, Antonius was much admired...