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 Bianca is beautiful and demure, with a plethora of wood-be suitors, but marriage is forbidden until her older sister Katherina finds a suitable match. The hitch? Fiery Katherina has sworn to deny the hand or demands of any would-be suitor. That is, until she meets her match in the wily Petrucio. As Katherina's own sharp tongue is met by Petrucio's feigned cruelty, the 'shrew' apparently capitulates. Or does she?

 This controversial comic tale, famously adapted into Cole Porter's Kiss Me Kate and 10 Things I Hate About You, has divided and amused audiences for over 400 years in an unforgettable battle of wits.

The Taming of the Shrew

Look, what I speak, my life shall prove it true;

That Mowbray hath received eight thousand nobles

In name of lendings for your highness' soldiers,

The which he hath detain'd for lewd employments,

Like a false traitor and injurious villain.

Besides I say and will in battle prove,

Or here or elsewhere to the furthest verge

That ever was survey'd by English eye,

That all the treasons for these eighteen years

Complotted and contrived in this land

Fetch from false Mowbray their first head and spring.

Further I say and further will maintain

Upon his bad life to make all this good,

That he did plot the Duke of Gloucester's death,

Suggest his soon-believing adversaries,

And consequently, like a traitor coward,

Sluiced out his innocent soul through streams of blood:

Which blood, like sacrificing Abel's, cries,

Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth,

To me for justice and rough chastisement;

And, by the glorious worth of my descent,

This arm shall do it, or this life be spent.

Richard the second

« J'ai voulu écrire cette tragédie comme un long poème en prose, sportif, souple et acéré. Bannir le romantisme de la traduction. J'ai voulu m'attacher à l'étrangeté poétique de ce monde perdu, peuplé de morts, et dans lequel les survivants tentent d'échapper à leur destin. Un roi non-roi, persécuté par sa propre souveraineté, des rivaux aussi féroces qu'aimants, un félon incapable d'assumer le régicide, une jeune reine résistante et dont la parole fait basculer le drame dans le non sense, pas si loin de Lewis Carroll. » Frédéric Boyer.

Tragédie du roi Richard II

The Tempest is Shakespeare's masterpiece of magical effects, redemptive romance, poetry and politics. Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition features illustrations by renowned artist Sir John Gilbert and an introduction by actor, writer and director Simon Callow. Prospero has long been exiled from Italy and banished to a remote island with his daughter Miranda. He uses his magical powers to conjure up a fearsome storm, and his enemies, including his treacherous broth Antonio, are shipwrecked. There follows a play filled with murderous plots, drunken confusion, love and redemption. And along the way, the reader discovers an unmistakable message that this is Shakespeare's own farewell to the stage.

The Tempest

Mesure pour mesure

Depuis de longues années, Yves Bonnefoy s'est persuadé que quelque chose de décisif a été expérimenté par Shakespeare dans l'assez brève période où l'auteur de Hamlet a écrit ses Sonnets. « Il a fait de ceux-ci, précise Yves Bonnefoy, une réflexion sur la poésie, de laquelle a résulté qu'il a choisi de cesser d'écrire des poèmes ; lesquels l'avaient rendu aussi notoire que son premier théâtre, pour se consacrer entièrement à la scène : choix qui, en profondeur, était en fait celui de la poésie en un sens plus moderne que celui que son époque plaçait dans les poèmes et leur prosodie régulière. C'est un choix qui est d'ailleurs reflété, médité et même explicité dans les pièces de très exactement ou juste après le moment où furent écrits les sonnets, notamment Roméo et As you like it. Je crois qu'il y a là une approche susceptible d'éclairer tout le théâtre de Shakespeare. »

Les sonnets ; Vénus et Adonis

After the exotic eroticism of Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare returned to Rome for one of his final tragedies, and the change could not have been more dramatic. Coriolanus is one of Shakespeare's harshest and most challenging studies of power, politics and masculinity, based around the life of Caius Marcius.  Based on the Roman chronicles of Plutarch's Lives and Livy's History of Rome, the play is set in the early years of the Roman Republic. Its famous opening scene, particularly admired by Bertolt Brecht, portrays its citizens as starving and rebellious, and horrified by the arrogant and dismissive attitude of Caius Marcius, one of Rome's most valiant but also political naive soldiers. Spurred on by his ambitious mother Volumnia, Caius takes the city of Corioles, is renamed Coriolanus in honour of his victory, and is encouraged to run for senate. However, his contempt for the citizens, who he calls "scabs" and "musty superfluity" ultimately leads to his exile and destructive alliance with his deadly foe, Aufidius. Despite its relative unpopularity, Coriolanus is a fascinating study of both public and personal life. Its language is dense and complex, as its representation of the tensions built into the fabric of Roman political life. Yet it also contains extraordinarily intimate scenes between Coriolanus and both his mother, who ultimately proves "most mortal" to her own son, and his enemy Aufidius, whose "rapt heart" is happier to see Coriolanus than his own wife. One of Shakespeare's darker and more disturbing plays. --Jerry Brotton

Coriolan

In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare creates a world of violence and generational conflict in which two young people fall in love and die because of that love. The story is rather extraordinary in that the normal problems faced by young lovers are here so very large. It is not simply that the families of Romeo and Juliet disapprove of the lover's affection for each other; rather, the Montagues and the Capulets are on opposite sides in a blood feud and are trying to kill each other on the streets of Verona. Every time a member of one of the two families dies in the fight, his relatives demand the blood of his killer. Because of the feud, if Romeo is discovered with Juliet by her family, he will be killed. Once Romeo is banished, the only way that Juliet can avoid being married to someone else is to take a potion that apparently kills her, so that she is burried with the bodies of her slain relatives. In this violent, death-filled world, the movement of the story from love at first sight to the union of the lovers in death seems almost inevitable.What is so striking about this play is that despite its extraordinary setting (one perhaps reflecting Elizabethan attitudes about hot-blooded Italians), it has become the quintessential story of young love. Because most young lovers feel that they have to overcome giant obstacles in order to be together, because they feel that they would rather die than be kept apart, and especially because the language Shakespeare gives his young lovers is so exquisite, allowing them to say to each other just what we would all say to a lover if we only knew how, it is easy to respond to this play as if it were about all young lovers rather than about a particular couple in a very unusual world. (When the play was rewritten in the eighteen century as The History and Fall of Caius Marius, the violent setting became that of a particularly discordant period in classical Rome; when Leonard Berstein rewrote the play as West Side Story, he chose the violent world of New York street gangs.)

The Taming of the Shrew

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