As a girl, Clara del Valle can read fortunes, make objects move as if they had lives of their own, and predict the future. Following the mysterious death of her sister, Rosa the Beautiful, Clara is mute for nine years. When she breaks her silence, it is to announce that she will be married soon to the stern and volatile landowner Esteban Trueba. Set in an unnamed Latin American country over three generations, The House of the Spirits is a magnificent epic of a proud and passionate family, secret loves and violent revolution.

Product Description: For nearly two centuries, the authorship of William Shakespeare's plays has been challenged by writers and artists as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, Henry James, Helen Keller, Orson Welles, Malcolm X, and Sir Derek Jacobi. How could a young man from rural Warwickshire, lacking a university education, write some of the greatest works in the English language? How do we explain the seemingly unbridgeable gap between Shakespeare's life and works? Contested Will unravels the mystery of Shakespeare's authorship, retracing why and when doubts first arose, what's at stake in the controversy for how we value Shakespeare's achievement, and why, in the end, there can be no doubt about who wrote the plays...read more

Traces the origins of the play portraying Jesus' death and resurrection, revealing its continuing tradition despite the Bavarian village's struggle with war and revolutions, and controversy over the play's anti-semitic message.

Product Description: No es posible hablar de las obras shakespearianas con independencia de su epoca, como tampoco lo es entender lo que experimento la sociedad en la que vivio Shakespeare sin la ayuda de las concepciones de este. en 1599 Shakespeare escribio cuatro de sus obras mas famosas (Enrique V, Julio Cesar, Como gusteis y Hamlet), los isabelinos enviaron al ejercito a aplastar una rebelion irlandesa, resistieron una amenaza naval espanola y apostaron por una joven Compania de las Indias Orientales mientras esperaban a ver quien sucedia a la reina Isabel y acudian en masa a los teatros de Londres, entre ellos el Globo, recientemente construido...read more

A lavishly detailed portrait of a year in the life of the bard traces his career in 1599, which marked the building of the Globe Theater, the English invasion of Ireland, and the creation of the plays, Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet. Simultaneous.

Most educated readers are familiar with the sinister figure of Shylock in Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice", an anti-Semitic stereotype of the cunning, greedy, and ruthless Jewish man. But how did a stereotype like Shylock enter the literature at all, given that there were so few Jews in Shakespeare's England? A lucid account of the cultural anxieties that plagued Elizabethan England, this work goes against the grain of the dominant scholarship on the period, which generally ignores the impact of Jewish questions in early modern England. The author shows how Elizabethans imagined Jews to be utterly different - in terms of religion, race, nationality and even sexuality. Drawing upon an extensive range of literature from the day-travel diaries, chronicles, sermons, political tracts, confessionals of faith, and parliamentary debates, to name a few - the book explores the questions that writers and readers of Shakespearean England had about Jews. In what ways were Jews racially and physically different? Did those who converted lose all trace of their Jewishness? Was it true that Jews habitually took the knife to Christians, circumcizing and then murdering their victims? These, argues Shapiro, were only several of the many questions that occupied the thinking of non-Jews in Elizabethan England. It shows how the various writings reveal more than simply negative attitudes about Jews - they uncover a broader set of English anxieties about their own identities. In this work, Shapiro sheds light on the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and opens new questions about culture and identity in Elizabethan England.