William Shakespeare

The Shakespeare allusion is curious and suggestive. Antonio is replying to Shylock's famous speech claiming humanity for Jews; he justifies his own racial or religious hostility, and suggests that usury can only be pracised on...

The first letter, the earliest piece in the volume, was said to have been written seventeen years ago at the age of seventeen: to Myra, which suggests that ML may have been one among...

This novel has two sections, Dream-Life and The Awakening, with an Intermezzo between the two: love is not part of the dream, but of the awakening to reality. The title-page quotation from La Fontaine

Her address to her husband rejoices that he has never bidden her to stop writing and work (that is do needlework) instead. In this connection she quotes from Lord Denny 's attempt to silence Lady Mary Wroth

Arguably Hardy's most melodramatic novel, The Return of the Native closes with a happy ending requested by the magazine editor. In a preface to a later edition, Hardy compared the story to Shakespeare 's King Lear.

Particular sketches include an allegory sent to Mary Leadbeater entitled The Birth of Calumny and the later Holland House, written in the person of the Ghost of La Bruyère. This, in a...

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...

Shakes Versus Shav, a puppet play by GBS dramatizing a confrontation between the two playwrights, was first produced at Malvern by the Waldo Lanchester Marionette Theatre .

This novel is both social history and satire, covering territory similar to that of Virginia Woolf 's The Years and May Sinclair 's The Tree of Heaven. Like these, it traces the lives of...

MP 's Catherine is not (like Shakespeare's) Katherine Parr, but is the French-born widow of Henry V , who formed an illicit union in about 1429 with the Welsh prince Owen Tudor , which produced...

A different third-person narrator replaces the somewhat pompous gentleman of An Antidote. The book's subect is the relations between the two Placid women, mother and daughter, and the squire's family, the Bustles (who are...

A series of reviews by others precedes Farr's own account of her musical recitations. These experiments in verse performance began as illustrations of Yeats's theories of the music and rhythm of spoken verse, but Farr...

Her theatrical memoirs are unchronological, unsorted, anecdotal, and vivid. She enjoys relating clashes or conflicts in which she comes out on top. She describes herself as solidly patriotic, though not one of the Union-Jack-waving Britishers...

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...

The novel takes place in the ugly town of Brombridge, whose industrial character is mentioned, but only fleetingly explored. Sellcuts', the town's music hall, burns down in mysterious circumstances. The manager, the dashing Paul...