Macbeth, a Summary of the Play

The Tragedy of Macbeth is a play written by William Shakespeare...

King Lear is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare, depicting the gradual descent into madness of the title character, after he disposes of his kingdom giving bequests to two of his three...

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare...

The Merchant of Venice is a 16th-century play by William Shakespeare in which a merchant in Venice must default on a large loan provided by a Jewish moneylender...

As You Like It is a pastoral comedy by William Shakespeare believed to have been written in 1599...

"The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark" is perhaps the most influential and widely acclaimed play by William Shakespeare...

Macbeth, Shakespeares kortste en bloedigste tragedie, dateert van 1606, kort na de mislukte aanslag op James I, als opvolger van Elizabeth de nieuwe koning van Engeland, die als James VI al koning van Schotland was. Zou de aanslag op koning en parlement (het zogeheten 'Buskruitverraad' of Gunpowder Plot, van 5 november 1605) zijn geslaagd, dan was het land in een chaos gestort. Engeland reageerde met een golf van sympathie voor de nieuwe koning. Daar kwam bij dat koning James de vergoeding voor toneelvoorstellingen aan het hof had verdubbeld tot twintig pond, een bedrag waar men een mooi huis voor kon kopen, en dat hij Shakespeare en zijn medespelers had verblijd met de titel 'kamerheer'. Goede redenen om de vorst te eren met een stuk dat in Schotland speelde (in Engeland wordt Macbeth vaak aangeduid als the Scottish play). Verstegen vertaalde van Shakespeare ook Shakespeare's sonnets, Hamlet, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra en Othello, en zijn twee lange, verhalende gedichten Venus

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare...

At once comic, tragic and erotic, Venus & Adonis (1593) is a poem by William Shakespeare based on passages from Ovid's Metamorphoses. This new Dutch translation by Hafid Bouazza of Shakespeare's text is illustrated by Marlene Dumas, with her complete suite of thirty-three works on paper reproduced throughout. The poem tells the story of Venus, the goddess of love, and her attempts to seduce the hunter Adonis. It is a complex, kaleidoscopic work in which love takes center stage - Venus's lustful yearning for Adonis ripples throughout, each stanza and line tinged with unrequited longing. Through a series of expressive ink washes, Dumas paints new passion into the poem - bodies bleed into one another, lips part in sighs of passion. As Venus declares, “Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, / Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.” Like Shakespeare before her, Dumas opens up a seemingly unending flow between light and dark, love and death, pleasure and pain.

A gripping journey up the River Magdalena into the centre of Colombia, and a deeply personal meditation on memory and loss in the footsteps of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Running through the heart of Colombia is a river emblematic of the fascination and tragedy of South America, the Magdalena. Considered by some to be the most dangerous place in the world, travellers along the river - for centuries the only route into the vast South American interior - were at the mercy of tropical disease, dangerous animals and precarious barges. A third of the victims of 'la violencia', Colombia's period of civil conflict which began in the 1950s, ended up in its waters. Townships alongside it have experienced some of the worst massacres in South American history. In 2011, Michael Jacobs travelled its whole length to the river's source high up in Andean moorlands controlled by guerrillas. In spellbinding prose, he charts the dangers he negotiated - including a terrifying three day encounter with the FAR…