Presents the original text of Shakespeare's play side by side with a modern version, discusses the author and the theater of his time, and provides quizzes and other study activities.

A new translation of Homer's epic adventure endeavors to instill the poetic nature of its original language while retaining accuracy, readability, and character vibrancy, creating the most captivating rendition of one of the defining masterpieces of Western literature.

All's Well That Ends Well (1607) is a comedy by William Shakespeare. All's Well That Ends Well was likely inspired by the tale of Giletta di Narbona from Boccaccio's Decameron. Unpopular during Shakespeare's lifetime, the play remains one of his least staged works to this day. Despite this, scholars praise All's Well That Ends Well for its moral ambiguity. "The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together, our virtues would be proud...

The influence of Euripides on the development of the dramatic genre cannot be overstated. Along with Sophocles and Aeschylus he is regarded as one of the three great Greek tragedians from classical antiquity. One of the most important of Euripides' surviving dramas is "Medea", the story of its title character, the wife of Jason of the Argonauts, who seeks revenge upon her unfaithful husband when he abandons her for a another bride. Set in Corinth...

One of the lesser known plays of the Greek tragedian Sophocles, "Electra" tells the tale of a young daughter's revenge for her father's death. Electra is one of the daughters of "Agamemnon," the leader of the Greeks during the Trojan War. He was killed by his wife's lover, and Electra wishes to avenge Agamemnon with the help of her twin brother Orestes. When she receives word that he is dead, Electra laments and fears she will not be able to avenge...

Using architecture, sculpture, culture and history, Adams humanizes the medieval period and provides valuable insight on religious philosophy. Mont-Saint Michel and Chartes provides a background and description of the construction of two French landmarks built in the 11th century. The Mont-Saint Michel cathedral was built during a militant time; it was not enough to simply be steadfast in one's own beliefs, but also to make others believe them. Religious...

In his clear preface, Gilbert Murray says with truth that The Trojan Women, valued by the usage of the stage, is not a perfect play. It is only the crying of one of the great wrongs of the world wrought into music. Yet it is one of the greater dramas of the elder world. In one situation, with little movement, with few figures, it flashes out a great dramatic lesson, the infinite pathos of a successful wrong. It has in it the very soul of the tragic....

Immanuel's Kant's groundbreaking work, considered to be among the most influential philosophical texts in the Western canon Familiar to philosophy students through the centuries, The Critique of Pure Reason is in many ways Kant's magnum opus. First published in 1781, it seeks to define what can be known by reason alone without evidence from experience. Kant begins by defining a posteriori knowledge, which is gained through the senses, versus a priori...

First published in English by Edward Fitzgerald in 1859 from its original Farsi, "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" is a collection of quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyam, a Persian astronomer and mathematician born in the later part of the 11th century. Omar Khayyam's poetry, which received very little international notoriety in its own day, achieved classic status when it was discovered and rendered into English verse by Edward Fitzgerald over seven...

Aeschylus was the first of the three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays can still be read or performed, the others being Sophocles and Euripides. He is often described as the father of tragedy: our knowledge of the genre begins with his work and our understanding of earlier tragedies is largely based on inferences from his surviving plays. Only seven of his estimated seventy to ninety plays have survived into modern times. Fragments of some other...