William Shakespeare

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...

It is set in the late nineteenth-century on the boundary between Westmorland and Lancashire, an exquisite country whose landscape has a profound effect in the narrative. Alan Helbeck, of an old Catholic family...

Janice Thaddeus discusses the prerogative MD assumed in giving names of her own invention to people and places. Her uncle Lansdowne was Alcander (a violent man mentioned in Plutarch 's Lives, who was forgiven...

Miranda and Ore try to understand the house's haunting in terms of the soucouyant, a Caribbean supernatural character that sheds skin and traverses boundaries. Ore describes the terror of the soucouyant as the danger of...

That JO intended to publish is suggested by her dedication To the Worthy and Constant Catholickes of England—especially, she says, rich ones. She expresses conventional humility, asking her readers to pardon I pray...

The narrative voice (a Scottish one, apparently as a kind of joke) is complex and shifting, with irony fed by unstable reference to the central couple (now Muriel and Henry, now Mother and Father, and...

The theatre where the action unfolds is the Dolphin, from Marsh's novel of 1966. The personages include a range of life-larger actors including a mysterious young New Zealander of Maori blood and the looming, awful...

Critics have pointed to a range of influences and allusions in this novel. Kate Flint has suggested that the representation of the sorrowful-eyed aesthete Francis Chaloner was a satiric jab at Oscar Wilde , who...

She opened with remarkable clarity, confidence, and accuracy for an entirely self-taught critic: Before Jane Austen began to write, the novelists of her day had depended on involved plot, sensational incident, and the long arm...

During her schooldays literature was her greatest escape. She remembers Hansel and Gretel, the first story she read in English and reread many times, followed by Snow White. She also read...

At this point Gertrude hears a noise in her late husband's room; Ethelind sees a mysterious armed personage resembling him; Winifred sees a tall, white figure; Ormond offers to lie in wait for the ghost...

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...

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...

The Inheritance opens with what sounds like an allusion to Jane Austen : It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that there is no passion so deeply rooted in human nature as that of pride.

Here AH opens by quoting Shakespeare , and applies her usual vivacious style and sense of immediacy to the story of a man who is wrongfully imprisoned, and eventually released only to find his wife...