A collection of five of Shakespeare's tragedies.

A volume of five of Shakespeare's most enduring works of tragedies, offering perennial insights into human emotion as well as telling inscriptions of the particular concerns of Shakespeare's own day.

An epic tragedy of love, war, murder, and madness, plucked from the pages of Shakespeare In All the World’s a Grave, John Reed reconstructs the works of William Shakespeare into a new five-act tragedy. The language is Shakespeare’s, but the drama that unfolds is as fresh as the blood on the stage. Prince Hamlet goes to war for Juliet, the daughter of King Lear. Having captured Juliet as his bride—by reckless war—he returns home to find that his mother has murdered his father and married Macbeth. Enter Iago, who persuades Hamlet that Juliet is having an affair with Romeo. As the Prince goes mad with jealousy, King Lear mounts his army. . . This play promises to be the most provocative and entertaining work to be added to the Shakespeare canon since Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Comic elements in Shakespeare's tragedies have often been noted, but while most critics have tended to concentrate on humorous interludes or on a single play, Susan Snyder seeks a more comprehensive understanding of how Shakespeare used the conventions, structures, and assumptions of comedy in his tragic writing. She argues that Shakespeare's early mastery of romantic comedy deeply influenced his tragedies both in dramaturgy and in the expression and development of his tragic vision. From this perspective she sheds new light on Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. The author shows Shakespeare's tragic vision evolving as he moves through three possibilities: comedy and tragedy functioning first as polar opposites, later as two sides of the same coin, and finally as two elements in a single compound. In the four plays examined here, Professor Snyder finds that traditional comic structures and assumptions operate in several ways to shape the tragedy: they set up expectations which when proven false reinforce the movement into tragic inevitability; they underline tragic awareness by a pointed irrelevance; they establish a point of departure for tragedy when comedy's happy assumptions reveal their paradoxical "shadow" side; and they become part of the tragedy itself when the comic elements threaten the tragic hero with insignificance and absurdity. Susan Snyder is Professor of English at Swarthmore College. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.