Genre Other. Page - 276

Description

The authorship of Edward III has been up for debate ever since it was first published in 1596. Its publisher, Cuthbert Burby, published it without listing an author, and any records that might have shed light on the author’s name (or names) were destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. In the 1760s, the acclaimed scholar Edward Capell was one of the first to claim that William Shakespeare might have been the author.

Many other academicians support this claim, or at least suggest Shakespeare partially wrote it, as certain archaic or obscure words and phrases found in the canonical Shakespearean plays also appear in this one. Others argue that Shakespeare would never write something so historically inaccurate; suggestions of possible alternative playwrights include Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Michael Drayton, Thomas Nashe, and George Peele. While the legitimate authorship may never come to light, Edward III has become accepted as part of Shakespeare’s canon of plays.

After the King of France passes away, a new heir must take the throne; without any brothers or sons in the direct line, the crown falls to his nephew, King Edward of England. French nobles refuse to hand over France to the English, claiming that the right of succession should never have passed through his mother Isabel, and order Edward to acknowledge King John as the rightful successor. These disputed claims to the kingdom of France launch the Hundred Years’ War.

This Standard Ebooks production is based on G. C. Moore Smith’s 1897 edition.

Description

The Country Wife was first performed in January 1672 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. It traces several plot lines, the principle of which follows notorious rake Harry Horner’s attempt to carry on affairs by spreading a rumor that he was now a eunuch and no longer a threat to any man’s wife. It was controversial for its sexual explicitness even in its own time, having several notorious scenes filled with extended sexual innuendo and women carousing, singing riotous songs, and behaving exactly like their male counterparts.

With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 the eighteen year ban on theater imposed by the Puritans was lifted. Charles II’s time in France had nurtured a fascination with the stage and, with his enthusiastic support, Restoration drama was soon once again a thriving part of the London culture—but it provided a completely different experience from Jacobean theater.

Christopher Wren’s newly built Theatre Royal provided a modern stage that accommodated innovations in scenic design and created a new relationship between actors and the audience. Another novelty, imported from France, was the presence of women on stage for the first time in British history. Restoration audiences were fascinated and often aghast to see real women perform, matching their male counterparts both in their wit and use of double entendre.

William Wycherley had spent some of the Commonwealth years in France and become interested in French drama. Borrowing extensively from Molière and others, he wrote several plays for this new theater, with his last two comedies, The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer, being the most famous. At the time, The Country Wife was considered the bawdiest and wittiest play yet seen on the English stage. It enjoyed popularity throughout the period but, as mores shifted and became more strict, the play was eventually considered too outrageous to be performed at all and between 1753 and 1924 was generally replaced on the stage by David Garrick’s cleaned-up, bland version.

Description

A Sicilian Romance begins when a tourist meets a local monk at the crumbling ruins of the castle Mazzini. The monk invites her to the monastery to view a manuscript that records the mysterious happenings that occurred hundreds of years ago in the once-great castle. The manuscript tells of the plight of two sisters, Julia and Emilia Mazzini, who, after the return of their tyrannical father, witness supernatural phenomena around the castle’s neglected southern wing.

Radcliffe was viewed as the greatest writer of the Gothic literary style by most early 19th century critics and literary historians despite Horace Walpole seemingly “inventing” the genre in The Castle of Otranto. A Sicilian Romance was first published anonymously in 1790, making it the second of her published works.

Description

Black Hawk, so named after the sacred medicine bag he carried with him, was a warrior and a leader of a tribe of Sauk Native Americans in the American Midwest circa 1800. He rose to leadership during a tumultuous time for his people, as they were pressed on all sides by the warlike British, the ruthlessly expansionist Americans, and the grudges and jealousies of neighboring tribes.

He lived as a warrior for much of his early life, when the War of 1812 between the British and the Americans forced the Sauk to take sides and enter the fray. Angered by the Americans’ demands they sign shaky treaties to cede their land, the tribe fought for the British until the toll of the war forced the tribe to bow out.

After the war, Black Hawk signed a peace treaty with the Americans, but a series of misunderstandings once again brought tensions between the Sauk and the Americans to a head. When a group of under-trained Illinois militia mistakenly opened fire on the Sauk, Black Hawk began what is known as the Black Hawk War, leading raids against American forts and settlements in an effort to reclaim their ancient land.

Even though Black Hawk managed to convince other tribes to join his cause, the war was quickly lost and Black Hawk captured. He was then taken on a tour of the vast East Coast cities in an attempt to impress upon him America’s overwhelming might. Despite his status as a former enemy, he was treated with dignity and respect by his captors before they granted him a small house and plot of land in Iowa to live out the rest of his days.

His autobiography was dictated to a translator, Antoine Le Clair, and written down by his amanuensis and publisher, J. B. Patterson. The story Black Hawk tells is a vivid one of life on the prairie, rich with tradition and meaning, but riven equally by war and bloodshed. As he reminisces about the bucolic life he and his ancestors once led and compares it with the hardships his people are facing, his sorrow becomes palpable; and as his days draw to a close, the reader sees that even to Black Hawk, the fate of his people appears inevitable.

Description

The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather’s third novel, was written in 1915. It is said to have been inspired by the real-life soprano Olive Fremstad, a celebrated Swedish-American singer who, like the protagonist, was active in New York and Europe during the time period depicted in the novel.

The work explores how an artist’s early life influences their work. In the novel, Thea Kronborg discovers her talent as a singer, and goes on to achieve great fame and success once she leaves her tiny village of Moonstone. Cather eschewed depicting rural life as being idyllic, instead focusing on the conservative, restricted, patriarchal structures that its inhabitants live by. Her work is thus considered to be one of the earliest so-called “Revolt Novels.” She depicts a time at the end of the 19th century when the American West was expanding rapidly and Americans were gaining sophistication in their understanding of culture and artists, particularly compared to Europe. The title of the novel comes from the name of a 1884 painting by Jules Breton, which is described and considered in the book itself.

Description

Christopher Marlowe wrote The Jew of Malta at the height of his career, and it remained popular until England’s theaters were closed by Parliament in 1642. Many have critiqued it for its portrayal of Elizabethan antisemitism, but others argue that Marlowe criticizes Judaism, Islam, and Christianity equally for their hypocrisy. This antisemitism debate continues on to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, which was written about ten years later and which some consider to be directly influenced by The Jew of Malta.

The play focuses on a wealthy Jewish merchant named Barabas who lives on the island of Malta. When the island’s governor strips Barabas of all his wealth in order to pay off the invading Turks, Barabas plots and schemes to get his revenge, killing all who get in his way and ultimately pitting Spanish Christians against Ottoman Muslims in an attempt to punish them all.

Scholars dispute the authorship of the play, with some suggesting that the last half was written by a different author. Though the play is known to have been performed as early as 1594, the earliest surviving print edition is from 1633, which includes a prologue and epilogue written by another playwright for a planned revival.

Description

Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! was first published in June of 1913 by Houghton Mifflin to high praise. Cather was immensely proud of the work and considered it her first “true” novel, having discovered her own form and subject.

Told in five parts, O Pioneers! follows the Bergsons, a family of Swedish-American immigrants farming the prairie of Nebraska at the turn of the 20th century. After the death of her father, heroine Alexandra Bergson inherits the family farm, using her insight to transform it from a precarious enterprise to a prosperous one over the following decade. As the Nebraskan farming community grows and her older brothers build families and comfortable lives, Alexandra remains independent, attached only to the land, her youngest brother, Emil, and her neighbor, Marie Shabata. These three central characters navigate duty, familial pressures, tragedy, and uncertain romance.

With its independent, entrepreneurial female main character, O Pioneers! can be read as a deeply feminist novel that nevertheless upholds American ideals of national destiny through pastoral settlement.

Description

Two decades after Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, the Baltimore Gun Club returns with its sights on the North Pole’s rich coal deposits. Access to the area would be facilitated under a more temperate climate, which, the team believes, can be achieved by slightly altering the Earth’s axis of rotation. This climate change would affect every region of the globe to various degrees, thus creating anxiety and opposition worldwide.

Sans Dessus Dessous, number 34 in the Voyages Extraordinaires collection, appeared in French in 1889 and was published in English the following year by J. G. Ogilvie as Topsy-Turvy.

Description

The Conquest of Bread is a political treatise written by the anarcho-communist philosopher Peter Kropotkin. Written after a split between anarchists and Marxists at the First International (a 19th-century association of left-wing radicals), The Conquest of Bread advocates a path to a communist society distinct from Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, rooted in the principles of mutual aid and voluntary cooperation.

Since its original publication in 1892, The Conquest of Bread has immensely influenced both anarchist theory and anarchist praxis. As one of the first comprehensive works of anarcho-communist theory published for wide distribution, it both popularized anarchism in general and encouraged a shift in anarchist thought from individualist anarchism to social anarchism. It was also an influential text among the Spanish anarchists in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, and the late anarchist theorist and anthropologist David Graeber cited the book as an inspiration for the Occupy movement of the early 2010s in his 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

Description

P. G. Wodehouse was an incredibly prolific writer who sold short stories to publications around the world throughout his career. The settings of his stories range from the casinos of Monte Carlo to the dance halls of New York, often taking detours into rural English life, where we follow his wide variety of distinctive characters and their trials, tribulations and follies.

The stories in this volume consist of most of what is available in U.S. public domain, with the exception of some stories which were never anthologized, and stories that are collected in themed volumes (Jeeves Stories, Ukridge Stories, and School Stories). They are ordered by the date they first appeared in magazine form.