When W.B. Yeats discovered Rabindranath Tagore's work in translation, he felt an intense kinship with a man, whose work was similarly grounded in spirituality and opposition to the British Empire. For the Irish poet, Tagore's poems were at once deeply personal and essentially universal, like a secret kept by all and shared regardless: "I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the...

Shakespeare's tragedy of jealousy and suspicion.

Brutus, best friend of the Roman ruler Caesar, reluctantly joins a successful plot to murder Caesar and subsequently destroys himself.

Professor Evans helps the reader to visualise the stage action of Romeo and Juliet . His history of the play in the theatre is followed by a lucid commentary which alerts the reader to the difficulties of language, thought and staging. For this updated edition Thomas Moisan has added an account of the number of important professional theatre productions and the large output of scholarly criticism on the play which have appeared in recent years.

The Aeneid (19 BC) is an epic poem by Roman poet Virgil. Translated by English poet laureate John Dryden in 1697, Virgil's legendary epic is the story of the hero Aeneas, a castaway from Troy whose adventures across the Mediterranean led him to Italy, where he discovered what would later become the city of Rome. Presented here in faithful translation, though rearranged to accommodate Dryden's rhyming couplets, The Aeneid is a treasure of classical...

In this autobiography, initially published in 1903, Helen Keller recalls her remarkable life as a blind and deaf woman taught to communicate by Ann Sullivan. Here among other memories, Keller describes her epiphany at the water pump when she connected the physical world with its linguistic counterpart. Keller was eventually educated at Radcliffe University, where she graduated with honors.

Jacob Flanders is a young man passing from adolescence to adulthood in a hazy rite of passage. From his boyhood on the windswept shores of Cornwall to his days as a student in Cambridge, his elusive, chameleon-like character is gradually revealed in a stream of loosely related incidents and impressions: whether through his mother's letters, his friend's conversations, or the thoughts of the women who adore him. Then we glimpse him as a young man,...

Utopia, a term coined by Thomas More from the Greek meaning "nowhere," envisions an imaginary island where a perfect society flourishes. This groundbreaking work of socio-political satire, divided into two books, offers a detailed account of the customs, governance, and daily life within this ideal community. In Book One, More crafts a narrative through correspondence with real-life acquaintances he met across Europe, lending credibility to his fictional...

Three Sisters (1900) is a drama in four acts by Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov. It was first performed at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1901, directed by acclaimed actor Konstantin Stanislavski-who also played the role of Aleksandr Ignatyevich Vershinin, a philosophizing artillery officer in love with middle Prozorov sister Masha. Reviews were mixed at first, but as the play continued to run, Three Sisters became a popular success,...

The Cherry Orchard (1903) is Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov's final play. It was first performed at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1904, directed by acclaimed actor Konstantin Stanislavski-who also played the role of Leonid Gayev, the bizarre and uninspired brother of Madame Ranevskaya. It has since become one of twentieth century theater's most important-and most frequently staged-dramatic works. After five years of living in...