Orem Library

An acclaimed Hamlet in the Royal Shakespeare Company's hit production (also a recent Great Performances production), David Tennant meets fellow actors who've tackled this most iconic of roles, including superstar Jude Law, and compares notes on the role's titanic challenges. Tennant digs deep into the text about the doomed Danish Prince alongside the actors Simon Russell Beale and Ben Whishaw.

Bob Smith grew up in a town named for Shakespeare's birthplace: Stratford, Connecticut. His troubled childhood was spent in a struggle to help his devastated parents care for his severely retarded sister. But at age ten, Smith stumbled onto a line from The Merchant of Venice: "In sooth I know not why I am so sad." In the language of Shakespeare, he had found a window through which to view the world. When he was a teenager, the American Shakespeare...

World-renowned Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt explores the playwright's insight into bad (and often mad) rulers. As an aging, tenacious Elizabeth I clung to power, a talented playwright probed the social causes, the psychological roots, and the twisted consequences of tyranny. In exploring the psyche (and psychoses) of the likes of Richard III, Macbeth, Lear, Coriolanus, and the societies they rule over, Stephen Greenblatt illuminates the...

As part of a rehabilitative prison program, inmates at a high-security prison in Rome prepare for a public performance of Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar.' As they rehearse, the prisoners find that the classic play has both a striking resonance and contrast to their confined lives.

This is a biography of a book: the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays printed in 1623 and known as the First Folio. It begins with the story of its first purchaser in London in December 1623, and goes on to explore the ways people have interacted with this iconic book over the four hundred years of its history. Throughout the stress is on what we can learn from individual copies now spread around the world about their eventful lives. From...

Presents a dramatization of William Shakespeare's play entitled Romeo and Juliet.

"Two star-crossed assassins in Elizabethan England must go undercover as actors in one of William Shakespeare's plays in a plot to kill the queen"-- In the early sixteen-hundreds, two star-crossed assassins, nineteen-year-old Toby and seventeen-year-old Kit, go undercover as actors in a Shakespeare play in a plot to kill Queen Elizabeth.

Six celebrated hosts to tell the stories behind the stories of Shakespeare's greatest plays, revealing not just the elements in the play, but the history of the play itself. What sparked the creation of each of these works? Where did Shakespeare get his plots, and what cultural, political and religious factors influenced his writing? Why has this body of work endured so thoroughly? What, in the end, makes Shakespeare so great?

Offers an in-depth exploration of Shakespeare's character Cleopatra, delving into the complexities of her personality as well as how the author's understanding of her has evolved over the years.