San Antonio College Library

Because his theater company often performed at court, Shakespeare was able to observe the frailty, vanity, and folly of kings firsthand, thus fueling his obsession with what lay behind the mask of royalty. Kingship became the subject of his greatest tragedies - Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear - and in these plays he stripped away that mask to reveal profound truths not just about kings and queens, but about the rest of us too. In this program, Simon...

Simon Schama explores the life and times of William Shakespeare to shed a new and fascinating light on some of the greatest plays ever written. Film two explores Shakespeare's attitude to kings, and how his great tragedies, Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear, reveal not only what lies behind the mask of royalty, but truths about the rest of us too. Throughout, an extraordinary cast of actors including Judi Dench, Simon Russell Beale, Tobias Menzies, Roger...

Interpretations - Falstaff - Ceremony and history - Prince Hal - View points.

From the ambitious and mad titular character to his devilish wife Lady Macbeth to the moral and noble Banquo to the mysterious Three Witches, Macbeth is one of William Shakespeare's more brilliantly populated plays and remains among the most widely read, performed in innovative productions set in a vast array of times and locations, from Nazi Germany to Revolutionary Cuba. Macbeth is a distinguished warrior hero, who over the course of the play, transforms...

"The Shakespearean Kings is an essay at once in the text of thirteen of the plays, history, and politics as an applied art-- an art which is not, after all, very different now than it was in the Sixteenth Century. While urging the essential integrity of the plays and the poet, the author does not try to make Shakespeare fit any of political or religious doctrines either of his age or of our own. In fact Shakespeare tested, and tired of, far more doctrines...