In a large country house in Derbyshire in April 1809 sits Lady Thomasina Coverly, aged thirteen, and her tutor, Septimus Hodge. Through the window may be seen some of the "five hundred acres inclusive of lake" where Capability Brown's idealized landscape is about to give way to the Gothic style: "everything but vampires," as the garden historian Hannah Jarvis remarks to Bernard Nightingale when they stand in the same room 180 years later. Bernard...

In Shaw's classic battle of the sexes, John Tanner flees when Ann Whitefield declares her intention to marry him.

The acclaimed Pelican Shakespeare series, now in a dazzling new series design The Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare's time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A.R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read...

Provincial theater in wartime England is the setting for this drama exploring an aging Shakespearean actor's relationship with his devoted dresser. 2 acts, 8 men, 3 women, 1 setting.

"As You Like It, Shakespeare's most lighthearted comedy and one of the best-loved and most performed of all his plays, was probably written in 1599 or 1600, though it was not printed until the First Folio of 1623. As its witty heroine is Shakespeare's longest female role, the play's performance history is marked by notable Rosalinds, from Hannah Pritchard and Margaret Woffington (giving rival performances in 1741), to Helen Faucit, Ada Rehan, Peggy...

Ten people find themselves stranded in the lonely house on Indian Island when their supposed hosts send word that they have been detained. A mysterious voice, afterwards discovered to come from a gramophone record, indicts each on of them -- the eight guests and the two servants -- of murder. It transpires that no-one has met their hosts and that they have evidently been decoyed to the island. First one and then another dies; each death according...