William Shakespeare

A preface (in the first volume) quotes the words of Samuel Johnson (with apology for applying them to so trifling a matter as novel-writing) about working at his dictionary amid grief and illness, feeling cut...

The earlier Adelaide and Antonine, whose lovers take refuge from the French Revolution in England, is balanced by Agnes, or The Wanderer, whose protagonist (another Revolution victim) is ordered by her doomed husband...

NM based the overpowering Lamprey family on an actual family of old friends who were a presence both in New Zealand and in England: Tahu Rhodes and his wife Helen or Nelly (a peer's daughter)...

The 1986 deregulation of the stock market—the Big Bang—by fortunate coincidence took place during the play's workshop and development period. The play centres on a corporate takeover, which functions allegorically: a corporate raider...

For readers familiar with the Shakespeare comedy (as Jemima certainly is), parallels are discernible between the personages and situations on stage and those of the actual world—parallels which are unsettling rather than helpful for Jemima...

But the most interesting feature of Midnight Weddings is the discussion of novels and novel-writing with which it opens. Meeke defends the function of novels (which, of course, must offer a good moral) and the...

The title-page quotes Milton and an unidentified French writer. Each of the unusually long chapters (four to a volume) is headed by a summary and a quotation, often from Shakespeare or Byron or attributed only...

LL thoroughly enjoyed working on this production, though she admits that it was a bit everything-but-the kitchen-sink on sexual politics. The play, which she describes as a daft Midsummer Musical comedy, brings elements...

In addition to its over-riding themes of colonialism and the marriage market, this novel, set in early British Calcutta (and incorporating a good deal of travel book material), is much concerned with literature and with...

Smith's take on Iphis and Ianthe begins with sisters Anthea and Imogen listening to their grandfather's stories from when I was a girl in the women's suffrage movement: a sure induction into matters of gender...

The title comes from the Fool in Shakespeare : Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness.This novel portrays the effects of attempting to control the destinies of others.Three different men are cast...

Although Shakespeare 's Richard III clearly plays a major role in shaping the myth of Richard's villainy against which Tey writes, she alludes to this play only in passing, when a character comments on Laurence Olivier

EH seeks to raise the canonical status of the novel in this work not only by serious politico-philosophical content, but also by chapter-heading quotations from the classics (from Horace , Shakespeare , and Milton to...

Jemima here makes her first attempt to be a detective as a fifteen-year-old convent schoolgirl. While many of these pieces, like the sardonically titled Have a Nice Death, are indeed murder stories, On the...

Jane, a widow whose only child is dead, decides to marry again, and picks the young Marquess of Montrath, heir to an earldom, whom she has first seen as a fellow visitor to the spunging-house...