Fiction Drama

This CliffsNotes study guide on William Shakespeare's Hamlet supplements the original literary work, giving you background information about the author, an introduction to the work, and critical commentaries, all for you to use as an educational tool that will allow you to better understand the work.

Last Winter is the story of a child who might not survive the heartbreak of her father’s death and a mother who struggles to both parent and manage her grief in the grips of a bipolar crisis. Atmospheric and deftly told with an economy of words and a finely tuned gaze on the small moments that build up to an inexorable and shocking end, this is a contemporary drama that will grip listeners both for the story and for the vibrant portrayal of the complexities of family life.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays the young, feisty, devastatingly acute Horace Rumpole in this collection of cracking cases, also starring Timothy West as the older Rumpole.

In Drama 99 FM, Janine Morris delivers a sizzling tale about three bodacious women who are living life to the fullest - and running the risk of crashing and burning. Naomi is a rising star in the music industry. Sereeta has a special talent for hooking up NBA ballers with luscious ladies. And Madison makes careers as the music director of the Big Apple’s hottest radio station. Each is on top of the world, but affairs of the heart have a way of turning everything upside down.

Mystery, power and malevolence are present in these plays, all of which subvert the happy endings that one would expect in a comedy and the tragic effect one would expect in a tragedy, to pose deeper moral questions that echo modern society. Performed by an incredible array of the 20th century’s greatest actors, Marlowe alumni including Roy Dotrice, Prunella Scales, Ian McKellen, Michael Hordern and Derek Jacobi can be heard in these recordings.

'I need you to say that I was with you.' For 30 years, best friends Steph and Pip have been through thick and thin. There's nothing they would not do for one another. Until these simple words change everything. Steph, eternally solid and dependable, is begging her friend to lie to the police as she's desperately trying to conceal not one but two devastating secrets to protect her family. Pip, self-consigned to the role of scatty hot-head, is overwhelmed; she's normally the one asking for help in a crisis. It's a big ask. So what would you do?

A Savannah florist is about to score the wedding of a lifetime—one that will solidify her career as the go-to-girl for society nuptials. Ironically, Cara Kryzik doesn't believe in love, even though she creates beautiful flower arrangements to celebrate them. But when the bride goes missing and the wedding is in jeopardy, Cara must find the bride and figure out what she believes in. Maybe love really does exist outside of fairy tales after all.

At twenty-four, Katie Gregory feels like life is looking up: she’s snagged a great job in New York City and is falling for a captivating artist - and memories of her traumatic past are finally fading. Katie’s life fell apart almost a decade earlier, during an idyllic summer at her family’s cabin on Eagle Lake when her best friend accused her father of sexual assault.

Kylie Jean's class is performing Alice in Wonderland! Kylie Jean knows she'd be just perfect as the Queen of Hearts. But mean girl Paula wants the part too....

When professional hockey player Sig Gauthier’s car breaks down and his phone dies, he treks into a posh private country club to call a tow truck, where he encounters the alluring Chloe Clifford, the manic pixie dream girl who captivates him immediately with her sense of adventure and penchant for stealing champagne. Sparks fly during a moonlight kiss and the enamored pair can’t wait to see each other again, but when Sig finally arrives to meet his dad’s new girlfriend over dinner, Chloe is confusingly also there. Turns out the girlfriend is Chloe’s mother. Oh, and they’re engaged.

In the Greek legend, a sculptor, Pygmalion, created a statue of a woman so beautiful that he fell in love with it. Later the goddess Aphrodite responded to his earnest prayers and brought the statue, named Galatea, to life. Shaw's Pygmalion is a fussy unmarried professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins, who claims that he could train an uneducated person off the street to speak so that he or she could pass as a member of the aristocracy. His Galatea is Eliza Doolittle, who sells flowers at Covent Garden and whose father is a dissipated but cunning vagrant. 

William Shakespeare may have been the greatest playwright in the English language, but how does he measure up as a historian? In this brilliant comparison between the events and characters in Shakespeare's history plays and the actual events that inspired them, acclaimed historian John Julius Norwich examines the nine works that together amount to an epic masterpiece on England's most fascinating period.

Élisée Poème grave des vers sur le banc public où il passe ses journées, devant la gare de Bordeaux. Les poches de son manteau sont pleines de petits morceaux de nappes en papier où il écrit les mots de ses poètes préférés. Aucun des autres personnages de cette pièce ne restera indifférent à cet homme bienveillant que la tragédie de la vie n'aura pas épargné. Mais la poésie est un enchantement et son manteau est tout simplement magique... L'interprétation de cette pièce met en valeur toute sa fantaisie et sa poésie.

Повесть Вечер накануне Ивана Купала - удивительное произведение, автором которого является великолепный драматург Николай Васильевич Гоголь. Бедный Петрусь, полюбив дочь богатого хозяина, готов ради любви на все: вечером накануне Ивана Купала он вместе с бродягой Басаврюком отправляется на поиски зарытого в лесу клада... Повесть Вечер накануне Ивана Купала входит в цикл Вечера на хуторе близ Диканьки, впервые была издана в 1830 году.

When her friends gift her a 23-and-Me test as a gag, high school senior Chloe Kang doesn’t think much of trying it out. She doesn’t believe anything will come of it—she’s an only child, her mother is an orphan, and her father died in Seoul before she was even born, and before her mother moved to Oklahoma. It’s been just Chloe and her mom her whole life. But the DNA test reveals something Chloe never expected— she’s got a whole extended family from her father’s side half a world away in Korea.

The weatherworn cottage Clachan has always been Jo Wilding’s sanctuary, a blissful escape from her tumultuous home life. From the first summer Rachel invited her to join the Willoughby family in the wilds of Scotland, she fell in love with the sea air, sandy beach and Tristan, Rachel’s older brother… All these years later, Clachan is where their most important occasions and conversations take place, so when Rachel organises a weekend there, Jo never suspects that this weekend will change everything.

Maggie Adair’s first year as a teacher at Downey House was a surprising success. After making the leap from an inner-city school in Glasgow, she’s learned to appreciate the mellower pace of the girls’ boarding school by the sea. Now engaged to her longtime boyfriend, sweet and steady Stan, Maggie’s just got to stop thinking about David McDonald, her colleague at the boys’ school down the road. Well, hasn’t she? Can Maggie take a leaf out of the Well Behaved Teacher’s exercise book and stick to her plan for a small but elegant wedding and settled life of matrimony?

By the time Shakespeare came to write Macbeth - almost certainly in 1605/1606 - he had already completed three of the great tragedies with which modern audiences are so familiar: Hamlet (1601), Othello (1603), and King Lear (1605). Each of those plays gives us an eponymous hero who is in some significant way flawed, but for whom we also inevitably feel deep sympathy, whatever his errors or crimes. But in MacBeth, Shakespeare has chosen for his tragic hero a man guilty of the most terrible crime imaginable to a Jacobean audience, that of regicide - the murder of a king.

These four plays, translated into blank verse by C. A. Wheelwright, present to us the wide range of this ancient playwright's fertile imagination. From war and peace to politics and society to the relationships between mena nd women, no topic is off-limits.

From the Pulitzer Prize winner for Drama and author of Homeland Elegies, a "sparkling and combustible" play about identity in America after September 11 (Bloomberg).