The Rape of Lucrece (1594) is a narrative poem by William Shakespeare about the legendary Lucretia. In his previous narrative poem,Venus and Adonis (1593), Shakespeare had included a dedicatory letter to his patron, the Earl of Southampton, in which he promised to write a "graver work". Accordingly, The Rape of Lucrece lacks the humorous tone of...

The Phoenix and the Turtle is an allegorical poem about the death of ideal love by William Shakespeare. It is widely considered to be one of his most obscure works and has led to many conflicting interpretations. It has also been called "the first great publishedmetaphysical poem". The title "The Phoenix and the Turtle" is a conventional label. As published, the poem was untitled....

The Inca of Perusalem, An Almost Historical Comedietta (1915) is a comic one-act play written during World War I by George Bernard Shaw. The plot appears at first to be a fairy-tale like story about a fantastical "Inca", but it eventually becomes obvious that the Inca is Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.  In a prologue a character called Ermyntrude says that though she...

The Duchess of Padua is a play by Oscar Wilde. It is a five-act melodramatic tragedy set in Padua and written in blank verse. It was written for the actress Mary Anderson in early 1883 while in Paris. After she turned it down, it was abandoned until its first performance at the Broadway Theatre in New York under the...

Venus and Adonis is a poem by William Shakespeare, written in 1592–1593, with a plot based on passages from Ovid's Metamorphoses. It is a complex, kaleidoscopic work, using constantly shifting tone and perspective to present contrasting views of the nature of love.  As Adonis is preparing to go hunting, Venus "seizeth on his sweating...

Coriolanus (pronounced [korioˈlaːnus]) is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1605 and 1608. The play is based on the life of the legendary Roman leader Caius Marcius Coriolanus. The tragedy is numbered as one of the last two tragedies written by Shakespeare along with Antony and Cleopatra.  Coriolanus is the...

In this essay originally published by the Fabian Society of Socialists, Mr. Shaw proposes situations of anarchy and follows them through to their logical finish.

Vera; or, The Nihilists is a play by Oscar Wilde. It is a melodramatic tragedy set in Russia and is loosely based on the life of Vera Zasulich. It was Wilde's first play, and the first to be performed. In 1880, with only a few copies privately printed, arrangements were made with noted actresses for a production the United Kingdom, but this never...

Love's Labour's Lost is one of William Shakespeare's early comedies, believed to have been written in the mid-1590s for a performance at the Inns of Court before Queen Elizabeth I. It follows the King of Navarre and his three companions as they attempt to forswear the company of women for three years of study and fasting, and their subsequent infatuation with...

The House of the Dead (Russian: Записки из Мёртвого дома, Zapiski iz Myortvogo doma) is a semi-autobiographical novelpublished in 1861 in the journal Vremyaby Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which portrays the life of convicts in a Siberianprison camp. The novel has also been published under the titles Memoirs from the House of The...

A revolutionist is one who desires to discard the existing social order and try another.  The constitution of England is revolutionary. To a Russian or Anglo–Indian bureaucrat, a general election is as much a revolution as a referendum or plebiscite in which the people fight instead of voting. The French Revolution overthrew one set of rulers and substituted another with different...

The very interesting and richly coloured masque or pantomimic play which is here printed in book form for the first time, was invented sometime in 1894 or possibly a little earlier.  It was written, not for publication, but as a personal gift to the author’s friend and friend of his family, Mrs. Chan Toon, and was sent to her with the letter that follows and explains its...

The Rowe-Tonson edition of Shakespeare's plays (1709) is an important event in the history of both Shakespeare studies and English literary criticism. Though based substantially on the Fourth Folio (1685), it is the first, "edited" edition: Rowe modernized spelling and punctuation and quietly made a number of sensible emendations. It is the first edition to include dramatis personae, the first to...

The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People is a play by Oscar Wilde. First performed on 14 February 1895 at the St James's Theatre in London, it is a farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personæ to escape burdensome social obligations. Working within the social conventions of late Victorian London, the play's major...

The Taming of the Shrew is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1590 and 1592.  The play begins with a framing device, often referred to as the induction, in which a mischievous nobleman tricks a drunken tinkernamed Christopher Sly into believing he is actually a nobleman himself. The nobleman then has the...

"Wherever there is centralisation there is stupidity." This is an ardent letter from Oscar Wild to the editor of the London Daily Chronicle calling for attention in regard to several hateful conditions in the English prisons. What makes this reading so sad is one being exposed to the amount of cruelties not only Oscar Wilde had to go through while in prison and the the agony and torment some of...

Henry VIII is a history play generally believed to be a collaboration between William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, based on the life of Henry VIII of England. An alternative title, All is True, is recorded in contemporary documents, the title Henry VIII not appearing until the play's publication in the First Folio of 1623. Stylistic...

An Ideal Husband is an 1895 comedic stage play by Oscar Wilde which revolves around blackmail and political corruption, and touches on the themes of public and private honour. The action is set in London, in "the present", and takes place over the course of twenty-four hours. "Sooner or later," Wilde notes, "we shall all have to pay for what we do." But he adds...

This work is based on the article on Shakespeare which I contributed last year to the fifty-first volume of the ‘Dictionary of National Biography. But the changes and additions which the article has undergone during my revision of it for separate publication are so numerous as to give the book a title to be regarded as an independent venture.  In its general aims, however, the...

Wilde’s Poems, a selection of which is given in this volume, were first published in volume form in 1881, and were reprinted four times before the end of 1882.  A new Edition with additional poems, including Ravenna, The Sphinx, and The Ballad of Reading Goal, was first published (limited issues on hand-made paper and Japanese...