Orem Library

William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of supposition arranged around scant facts. With his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself. Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, and, emulating the style of his travelogues, records episodes in his own research. He celebrates Shakespeare...

This refresher reference volume features concise character and plot summaries for 12 of Shakespeare?s best-known plays, drawn from the SparkNotes website and illustrated with colorful infographics.

Presents Shakespeare's dark comedy about young lovers and a Jewish money lender who demands a pound of flesh in payment for a debt. Includes explanatory notes on facing pages, scene-by-scene plot summaries, a key to famous lines and phrases, a modern perspective essay, and an introduction to the play and the language of Shakespeare.

William Shakespeare found dozens of different ways to kill off his characters, and audiences today still enjoy the same reactions - shock, sadness, fear - that they did more than 400 years ago when these plays were first performed. But how realistic are these deaths, and did Shakespeare have the knowledge to back them up? In the Bard's day death was a part of everyday life. Plague, pestilence and public executions were a common occurrence, and the...

"William Shakespeare's Hamlet is probably the best-known and most commented upon work of literature in Western culture. The paradox is that it is at once utterly familiar and strangely elusive--very like our own selves, argues Gabriel Josipovici in this stimulating and original study. Moreover, our desire to master this elusiveness, to "pluck the heart out of its mystery, " as Hamlet himself says, precisely mirrors what is going on in the play; and...

During the 1967 school year, on Wednesday afternoons when all his classmates go to either Catechism or Hebrew school, seventh-grader Holling Hoodhood stays in Mrs. Baker's classroom where they read the plays of William Shakespeare and Holling learns much of value about the world he lives in.

Stills from the motion picture "Shakespeare in Love" accompany poems and excerpts from plays.