A young woman moves to a commune and disguises herself as a teenage boy to spend time with a sensitive jock… Does it sound like the plot of a pretty decent 2000s romantic comedy? Yes, but it’s also a classic of world theater! The Summer Stage Under the Stars series returns to Lansing Community College this week with the Shakespearean comedy As You Like It. Following the romantic mishaps of a royal family living in exile, As You Like It is equal parts mischievous, musical, and melodramatic. The show runs in the outdoor LCC amphitheater from June 26 to June 30, from 7 pm to 9 pm. Admission is free and the show is open to the public!
In preparation for the show and in celebration of the world’s favorite 400-year-old playwright, the LCC Library has curated a collection of Shakespearean books. These titles will provide context and new points of view to help you better experience and enjoy the work of Shakespeare. Whether you are a longtime fan of the Bard or have never experienced a Shakespeare play, there is a book here for you!
Books will be displayed on the second floor of the Technology and Learning Center during the run of the show. Books may be checked out from the library at the Help Zone on the second floor.
Books
As You Like It: With New and Updated Critical Essays and a Revised Bibliography by The Signet Classics edition of William Shakespeare's comedic play about two enduring human illusions-the dream of a simple life and the ideal of romantic love. Banished from her uncle's court, young princess Rosalind disguises herself as a farmer and encounters a memorable cast of characters-including her love Orlando-in the Forest of Arden in this witty, subversive comedy. This revised Signet Classics edition includes unique features such as- . An overview of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater .A special introduction to the play by the editor, Albert Gilman . Selections from Thomas Lodge's Rosalynd, the source from which Shakespeare derived As You Like It . Dramatic criticism fromArthur Colby Sprague, Helen Gardener, and others . A comprehensive stage and screen history of notable actors, directors, and productions . Text, notes, and commentaries printed in the clearest, most readable text . And more...
Shakespeare: a Very Short Introduction by Germaine Greer examines Shakespeare's plays in detail, showing how he dramatized moral and intellectual issues in such a way that his audience became dazzlingly aware of an imaginative dimension to daily life. She argures that as long as Shakespeare's work remains central to English cultural life, it will retain the values which make it unique in the world.
How to Enjoy Shakespeare by Readers and playgoers who are new to Shakespeare (and even more seasoned veterans who would like to appreciate him more than they do) often find themselves puzzled: what is going on? His characters speak in verse rather than in the patterns of everyday speech. They are figures that ordinary humans seldom encounter kings, queens, dukes, cardinals, and generals. Some of the plays are set in places even the most seasoned traveler is unlikely to have visited Bohemia, Illyria, and the ancient Greek cities of Asia Minor and in times from the distant past imperial Rome, medieval Venice, Homer's Troy. What's more, the plots pursue events that seemingly have little to do with the daily round of modern lives contention for a royal crown, assassination, shipwreck, occult visitation. Robert Fallon's small book is designed to dispel some of this apparent strangeness. It shows readers that what may at first seem unfamiliar to them is in fact close to their own lives. Kings and queens emerge as recognizable fathers and mothers, dukes and earls as squabbling siblings of any era. Exotic locales might be any present-day village or city block. And the plots resemble stories to be found in the pages of our morning newspaper. Shakespeare's language takes some getting used to, but even a brief acquaintance with its cadence and imagery will offer a glimpse of its glories. In How to Enjoy Shakespeare, Mr. Fallon explores Shakespeare's familiarity in five sections dealing with language, theme, staging, character, and plot, each abundantly illustrated with episodes and quotations from the plays. He writes in easily accessible prose in a book designed to make modern readers and audiences feel comfortable with the Bard."
A Theatergoer's Guide to Shakespeare by In surveys of the plays that will help readers and viewers follow the action with ease and understanding, Robert Fallon opens a window to Shakespeare's time while illuminating the timelessness of his works. Mr. Fallon examines the most frequently staged plays scene by scene, and those less frequently performed act by act. He provides intelligent readers with incisive and engaging commentary on character, theme, setting, poetry, and stage history. Wonderfully reader-friendly. --William Kerrigan, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt, the charismatic Harvard professor who "knows more about Shakespeare than Ben Jonson or the Dark Lady did" (John Leonard, Harper's), has written a biography that enables us to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life; full of drama and pageantry, and also cruelty and danger; could have become the world's greatest playwright. A young man from the provinces--a man without wealth, connections, or university education--moves to London. In a remarkably short time he becomes the greatest playwright not just of his age but of all time. His works appeal to urban sophisticates and first-time theatergoers; he turns politics into poetry; he recklessly mingles vulgar clowning and philosophical subtlety. How is such an achievement to be explained? Will in the World interweaves a searching account of Elizabethan England with a vivid narrative of the playwright's life. We see Shakespeare learning his craft, starting a family, and forging a career for himself in the wildly competitive London theater world, while at the same time grappling with dangerous religious and political forces that took less-agile figures to the scaffold. Above all, we never lose sight of the great works--A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, and more--that continue after four hundred years to delight and haunt audiences everywhere. The basic biographical facts of Shakespeare's life have been known for over a century, but now Stephen Greenblatt shows how this particular life history gave rise to the world's greatest writer. Bringing together little-known historical facts and little-noticed elements of Shakespeare's plays, Greenblatt makes inspired connections between the life and the works and deliver "a dazzling and subtle biography" (Richard Lacayo, Time). Readers will experience Shakespeare's vital plays again as if for the first time, but with greater understanding and appreciation of their extraordinary depth and humanity. A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2004; Time magazine's #1 Best Nonfiction Book; A Washington Post Book World Rave ; An Economist Best Book ; A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book; A Christian Science Monitor Best Book; A Chicago Tribune Best Book; A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Best Book ; NPR's Maureen Corrigan's Best.
eBooks
Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Murder, Madness, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint by *Winner of the 2024 Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Award for Life Writing* "A wickedly entertaining" (The New York Times) detective story that chronicles one Mississippi man's relentless search for an authentic portrait of William Shakespeare. Following his divorce, down-and-out writer and Mississippi exile Lee Durkee holed himself up in a Vermont fishing shack and fell prey to a decades-long obsession with Shakespearian portraiture. It began with a simple premise: despite the prevalence of popular portraits, no one really knows what Shakespeare looked like. That the Bard of Avon has gotten progressively handsomer in modern depictions seems only to reinforce this point. "Intensely readable...with bust-out laughing moments" (Garden & Gun), Stalking Shakespeare is Durkee's fascinating memoir about a hobby gone awry, the 400-year-old myriad portraits attached to the famous playwright, and Durkee's own unrelenting search for a lost picture of the Bard painted from real life. As Durkee becomes better at beguiling curators into testing their paintings with X-ray and infrared technologies, we get a front-row seat to the captivating mysteries--and unsolved murders--surrounding the various portraits rumored to depict Shakespeare. Whisking us backward in time through layers of paint and into the pages of obscure books on the Elizabethans, Durkee travels from Vermont to Tokyo to Mississippi to DC and ultimately to London to confront the stuffy curators forever protecting the Bard's image. For his part, Durkee is the adversary they didn't know they had--a self-described dilettante with nothing to lose, the "Dan Brown of Elizabethan portraiture." A bizarre and surprisingly moving blend of biography, art history, and madness, Stalking Shakespeare is a "gripping, poignant, and enjoyable" (The Washington Post) journey that will forever change the way you look at one of history's greatest cultural and literary icons.
Hamnet: a Novel of the Plague by NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The bestselling author of The Marriage Portrait delivers a luminous portrait of a marriage, a family ravaged by grief, and a boy whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time. * "Of all the stories that argue and speculate about Shakespeare's life ... here is a novel ... so gorgeously written that it transports you." --The Boston Globe England, 1580: The Black Death creeps across the land, an ever-present threat, infecting the healthy, the sick, the old and the young alike. The end of days is near, but life always goes on. A young Latin tutor--penniless and bullied by a violent father--falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman. Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family's land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon, she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is just taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.