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Since her execution at Holloway prison in 1923, Edith Thompson has haunted the conscience of the nation. Grave doubts were expressed at the time about the extent to which she was responsible for her husband's murder in Ilford by her handsome young lover Frederick Bywaters. The Home Office files on the case were marked not to be opened for 100 years. The case against her rested largely on the evidence provided by 70 letters which she wrote to Bywaters. The truth is that these letters offer a unique insight into the workings of an overwrought romantic imagination, ultimately unable to free itself from the constraints of a suburban marriage and respectability. Through this correspondence and a painstaking reconstruction of the era, the author argues that Mrs Thompson was innocent.
Intimacies with Marlowe, entanglements in London with the mysterious dark lady, the probable fathering of an illegitimate son - the mysteries of Shakespeare's personal life have proven tantalisingly obscure. In Shakespeare Revealed, acclaimed authority, René Weis, brings the man and his milieu to the fore in a compelling reassessment. Breaking with tradition, he reveals how the works themselves contain a rich seam of clues about Shakespeare's life, from his heretical dalliances with Catholicism to his grief at the death of his son Hamnet. If there is a code in his writing, Shakespeare always intended it to be broken. This striking re-reading is consolidated by scrupulous archival research. Through reconstruction of records of the age, René Weis builds a colourful picture of Shakespeare's daily life: the bustling market town of Stratford, the spellbinding forests of Warwickshire, the pell-mell of London's theatres. Above all he reanimates Shakespeare's social scene: Stratford's family affairs and neighbourly disputes and a dangerous London scene, peopled with shady spies, informers and torturers.
This reissed edition of Longman Annotated Texts King Lear includes comprehensive notes, annotations and an introduction, all designed to be of use to undergraduates and interested readers. King Lear is one of Shakespeare's most widely studied tragedies. However, since the late 1970s textual scholars, critics and editors have argued that there is no single 'King Lear' text. Anyone studying the play needs to be aware of two different texts, one based on the quarto of 1608, The History of King Lear, and a revised version published in the first folio of 1623, The Tragedy of King Lear. This edition offers a fully annotated, modern spelling version of the texts set side by side, identifying and elucidating the major discrepancies between the two. It presents some possible reasons for the differences between the two texts, which themselves shed light on a number of issues relating to literary transmission in the Renaissance and give an insight into the nature of performance and censorship.
The story of Marie Duplessis, the woman who inspired Verdi's La traviata. A rags-to-riches fairytale, from rural poverty to Parisian stardom, which ended in tragedy but gave rise to some of the most heart-wrenching and lyrical music ever composed.
This work aims to reconstruct one of the most vividly documented fragments of medieval life concerning the late Cathar community in south-west France. Following the inquisition of the 1240s in which 10,000 Cathars were burned at the stake, it seemed this early heretical movement had been fully quashed. Fifty years later however, a revival was started, centred around the small town of Montaillou and led by the charismatic Authies brothers. It would be another 30 years before Rome finally stamped out the movement.
This volume offers John Webster's two great Jacobean tragedies, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, together with his brilliant tragicomedy, The Devil's Law-Case, and the comedy written with William Rowley, A Cure for a Cuckold. Webster is a radically and creatively experimental dramatist. His tragedies deploy shifting dramatic perspectives which counteract and challenge conventional moral judgements, while the predominantly gentler tone of his comedies and tragicomedies responds inventively to contemporary changes in dramatic taste and fashion. All four plays display the provocative intelligence of a profoundly original playwright. Under the General Editorship of Michael Cordner of the University of York, the texts of the plays have been newly edited and are presented with modernized spelling and punctuation. In addition, there is detailed annotation, a glossary, and a critical introduction which traces Webster's artistic development, defends him against charges of overindulgence in violence, and explores his sophisticated staging and scenic forms.
The question of the reality of Cathars and other heresies is debated in this provocative collection.
This major new edition of Shakespeare's greatest tragedy of love argues that that play is ultimately Juliet's. The play text is expertly edited and the on-page commentary notes discuss issues of staging, theme, meaning and Shakespeare's use of his sources to give the reader deep and engaging insights into the play. The richly illustrated introduction looks at the play's exceptionally beautiful and complex language and focuses on the figure of Juliet as being at its centre. René Weis discusses the play's critical, stage and film history, including West Side Story and Baz Luhrmann's seminal film Romeo + Juliet. This is an authoritative edition from a leading scholar, giving the reader a penetrating and wide-ranging insight into this ever popular play.
Compact Time builds a scientific case that the Earth, with all its living creatures, is actually thousands of years old, not the millions so widely accepted. This unconventional book takes readers on a journey of discovery into the realm of time – re-examining the very history of the Earth. It highlights the fallacies of methods currently applied to timing Earth history and then draws attention to the radiocarbon dating technique. Radiocarbon decays away in only thousands of years and undecayed, radiocarbon permeates the whole geologic column; it’s even in fossil dinosaur bones. This implies a compact timescale of only thousands of years for the whole span of life on Earth. Historical, geological and paleontological lines of evidence supporting this new theory are examined. The implications for understanding human history and the religious significance are assessed within Compact Time.
The Law of Evidence has traditionally been perceived as a dry, highly technical, and mysterious subject. This book argues that problems of evidence in law are closely related to the handling of evidence in other kinds of practical decision-making and other academic disciplines, that it is closely related to common sense and that it is an interesting, lively and accessible subject. These essays develop a readable, coherent historical and theoretical perspective about problems of proof, evidence, and inferential reasoning in law. Although each essay is self-standing, they are woven together to present a sustained argument for a broad inter-disciplinary approach to evidence in litigation, in which the rules of evidence play a subordinate, though significant, role. This revised and enlarged edition includes a revised introduction, the best-known essays in the first edition, and chapters on narrative and argumentation, teaching evidence, and evidence as a multi-disciplinary subject.